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A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS 



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A SYSTEM OF 



METAPHYSICS 



BY 



GEORGE STUART FULLERTON 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
NEW YORK 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1904 



LIBRARY of COMGREbS 
Two Copies Receivea 

NOV 14 I9U4 

CoDyncnt tntry 

CLASS A XXc. No 
COPY B. 



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Copyright, 1904, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1904. 



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Norwooil, Mass., U.S.A. 






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TO 



JULIA WINSLOW FULLERTON 

THIS BOOK 

IS INSCRIBED 



PREFACE 

Some of the material in Chapters I, II, and V of this volume 
has already appeared in the Psychological Review; and Chapters 
XV, XVI, and XVII have been reprinted without very much 
change. They first appeared as articles in the same journal. In 
Chapter XXXIII I have made some use of two articles published 
in the Popular Science Monthly. The chapters on Space and 
Time are reprinted from the Philosophical Review with little 
change except that, in Chapter XI, some new matter has been 
added. To the editors of the journals mentioned. Professor 
Cattell, Professor Baldwin, and Professor Creighton, my thanks 
are due for their courtesy in permitting me to reprint as I 
have done. 

Thus, about one-fourth of the present volume has already seen 
the light. It is right that I should say that nothing that has 
already appeared has been taken up into the book as an after- 
thought. From the beginning the work has been a unit ; it has 
been for a number of years on my hands, and the publication of 
the papers above mentioned was due largely to a curiosity to 
see how the doctrines advocated would impress others. It was, 
perhaps, hardly fair to present them deprived of their setting, 
and this injustice, if injustice it be, is remedied now. 

At the end of the book I have placed a note on the Physical 

World Order, by my former pupil. Professor Edgar A. Singer, 

Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania. It has seemed to me of 

especial interest, as coming from one trained in metaphysical 

analysis and familiar with the principles and methods of the 

sciences. 

GEORGE STUART FULLERTON. 

Columbia University, 
New York, July, 1904. 

vii 



CONTENTS 
PART I 

THE CONTENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

PAGE 

I. The Mind and the World in Common Thought and 

IN Science 1 

11. The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint . 17 

III. How Things are Given in Consciousness ... 33 

IV. The Elements in Consciousness 56 

V. The Self or Knower 71 

PART II 

THE EXTERNAL WORLD 

VI. What we Mean by the External World ... 95 

VII. Sensations and "Things" 115 

VIII. The Distinction between Appearance and Reality . 132 
IX. Significance of the Distinction between Appearance 

AND Reality 146 

X. The Kantian Doctrine of Space 162 

XI. Difficulties connected with the Kantian Doctrine 

of Space 172 

XII. The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 184 

XIIL Of Time 194 

XIV. The Real World in Space and Time .... 210 

XV. The World as Mechanism 226 

PART III 

MIND AND MATTER 

XVI. The Insufficiency of Materialism 245 

XVII. The Atomic Self 262 

XVIII. The Automaton Theory: its Genesis .... 284 



X 



Contents 



XIX. The Automaton Theory: Parallelism 



PAOE 

. 298 

XX. What is Parallelism? 313 

XXI. The Man and the Candlestick 33*2 

XXII. The Metaphysics of the "Telephone Exchange" . 342 

XXIU. The Distinction between the World and the Mind . 364 

XXIV. The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas . . 385 
XXV. Of Natural Realism, Hypothetical Realism, Idealism 

AND Materialism 399 

XXVI. The World as Unperceived, and the " Unknowable " . 415 



PART IV 

OTHER MINDS, AND THE REALM OF MINDS 

XXVII. The Existence of Other Minds 433 

XXV'III. The Distribution of Minds 458 

XXIX. The Unity of Consciousness 473 

XXX. Subconscious Mind 488 

XXXI. Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus . . . 508 

XXXII. Mechanism and Teleology 527 

XXXIII. Fatalism, "Free-will," and Determinism . . . 550 

XXXIV. Of God 570 

XXXV. Of God (continued) 598 

Note. — The Physical World Order 609 



A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS 



PART I 

THE CONTENr OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

CHAPTER I 

THE MIND AND THE WORLD IN COMMON THOUGHT AND 

IN SCIENCE 

It is impossible for the mature mind to turn back to the expe- 
riences of infancy, and directly to recall, by an exercise of memory, 
the beginnings of its conscious life. When we have attained to 
an age at which reflection is possible, and at which the impulse to 
reflect makes itself felt, the dawn of consciousness has passed into 
oblivion ; and he who is curious to inquire how the world looked 
to him, when he first rolled an unmeaning eye at it, must be con- 
tent with information gained in roundabout ways. As far back as 
we can remember, the world of our experiences has not been so 
very different from the world in which we now habitually live. 

It was formerly, it is true, a more indefinite and a more incohe- 
rent world, less marked by clear distinctions and less orderly, more 
full of acutely delightful and acutely distressing surprises, more 
exciting and more mysterious. Memory gives us a series of pic- 
tures imperfectly representing the successive stages by which the 
more sober and orderly world of our later experience came into 
being. But as we journey into the past the pictures become more 
and more indefinite and incomplete, and the series comes to an end 
before their general outline has passed over into a something more 
rudimentary and of a quite different nature. The world which 
we can recall is always a world of things^ among which we find 
one peculiar and interesting thing not to be placed precisely on a 
par with the rest, the self, which tastes, touches, and possesses 
things — the sun around which other things are made to revolve. 

That this series of experiences has been preceded by other expe- 
riences in which such distinctions do not exist, and that they are 

B 1 



2 The Content of Consciousness 

the result of a development from an experience of the workl — if 
one may call it such — in which there are as yet no objects with 
definite relations to each other, may be satisfactorily established 
partly by reflection upon the series of experiences which we can 
recall, with the developments to be there observed, and partly by 
observation and interpretation of the actions of human bodies 
which reveal minds just passing through the earlier stages of their 
existence. Thus, there is good reason to believe that the distinc- 
tion between the self and the not-self, a distinction which thrusts 
itself upon the attention of the developed mind with such insist- 
ence that we are inclined to read it into the experience of every 
mind, however rudimentary — there is good reason to believe that 
this distinction, like a multitude of others which make their 
appearance in later life, was not present at the dawn of conscious- 
ness at all. 

But, however it may be with the infant mind, the mature man 
always finds himself in a real world of real things, and he distin- 
guishes between himself, as knowing and acting upon things, and 
the things over against which he stands as a something apart and 
different. As has been said, he can remember no time at which 
he did not make some such distinction. Unless he be accustomed 
to reflective thought, it sounds to him highly absurd to speak of 
a conscious experience in which such distinctions do not obtain. 
Can there be, he asks, a pain that is felt by no one ? Can there be 
knowledge, or even anything faintly resembling knowledge, unless 
there be something known and some one who knows that something ? 

His experience at every moment seems to fortify him in this 
position. He looks at the pen which he holds in his hand, feels it, 
is sure that he knows it, and that it is he that knows it. The pen 
seems capable of existing by itself, but surely it cannot know 
itself. It appears too immediately evident to call for proof that 
every act of knowledge requires the two participants, the knower 
and the known. When he suffers, he is convinced that he feels 
the pain, and he knows that he and the pain are not identical. 
He regards it as quite impossible to doubt the reality of such 
experiences, which repeat themselves everywhere in his mental 
life, and he listens with some impatience to any argument which 
seems gratuitously to cast doubt upon their reality. 

That men actually do have such experiences as those cited it 
•would be folly to deny, and something may be said for the plain 



The Mind and the World 3 

man who turns a deaf ear to the metaphysician, charm he never so 
wisely. We do know objects, and in the act of knowing, if we 
think about the matter at all, we are conscious of distinguishing 
between the knower and the objects known. One can have no 
legitimate quarrel with this experience, in itself considered, nor is 
it reasonable to attempt to explain it away. The only reasonable 
thing to do is to try to analyze it, and to indicate clearly just what 
elements it contains; in other words, to show plainly what the 
experience really is. That one may have experiences without 
being able to analyze them successfully, and that most men make 
little attempt to analyze their experiences, is matter of common 
observation. An experience unanalyzed is only half possessed, 
and may easily give rise to serious misconceptions. 

It needs but little reflection to convince the man who feels so 
sure of the existence of the knowing self, of the object known, and 
of the activity exercised by the former, that there is much in his 
experience that is vague and indefinite. Some distinctions he read- 
ily makes which are not made by the child. For example, where 
it never occurs to the child to define in any way what he means by 
the self, the unavoidable half-conscious reflection to which one is 
impelled by everyday life leads the man to, at least, a dim con- 
sciousness of what is to be included under this name and what is to 
be excluded. 

The child does not distinguish between mind and body ; the 
self is a something vaguely distinguished from other objects, and 
in it the body stands out as the most prominent element, but there 
is no conscious distinction between the bodily self and the mental, 
with the consequent recognition of the latter as the true self which 
knows and acts upon things, and from which all other things, 
including the body, must be distinguished. To the man these 
distinctions have become more or less familiar. Vague and indefi- 
nite as his ideas are, he has arrived at somewhat the same way of 
looking at things as that adopted by the psychologist ; and, indeed, 
it is not unreasonable to regard his view of the mind and the exter- 
nal world as constituting the beginnings of a science of psychology. 
He believes that he has a mind, though he has no very clear notion 
of what it is. He believes that this mind is intimately related to 
his body, which is a thing outside of his mind. He believes that 
through this body it is related to an external real world, from which 
it receives influences and which it can influence in return. In this 



4 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

external world he thinks he finds other bodies more or less closely 
resembling liis own, and believes that there are connected with 
them other minds, as his mind is connected with his body. Further, 
lie believes that as he can express, by the actions of his body, ideas 
or emotions in his mind, so the minds connected with other bodies 
can give expression to their ideas or emotions, and such an expres- 
sion is to him the revelation of the contents of these other minds. 
By comparing the mental states of other men with his own, he 
comes to form some general notions of the contents of other minds 
and of the ways in which they act, thus arriving at the beginnings 
of a mental science. He may have done all this without ever 
having heard of the science of psychology. No one who has not 
done all this has arrived at the knowledge of the world proper to 
a human being of mature years, however unscientific. Of course, 
some do the work better than others, and arrive at a more accurate 
knowledge of the external world and of their own and of other 
minds. But done in some way it must be, unless healthy mental 
development be arrested. It is the normal man's way of looking 
at the world in which he finds himself. 

That such a knowledge of things as that above described is 
less indefinite and rudimentary than that of the child in its ear- 
lier years is sufficiently evident. Minds have come to be distin- 
guished from material things, and knowledge has become in itself 
an object of attention. And yet, as I have said above, it requires 
but little reflection to convince the plain man at this stage of his 
progress toward clear thinking, that there is still much in his 
experience which is very indefinitely and unsatisfactorily known. 
He speaks of an external world, but would be at a loss to describe, 
if asked to do so, just what he means by that phrase. The mind 
he distinguishes from the body, and yet when he is brought to 
ask himself what a mind is, and hoiv he thinks of it, he realizes 
that his thought is vagueness incarnate. He probably makes a 
distinction between the mind and its ideas, but can give no intel- 
ligible account of the relation of the mind to these ideas; and 
although he feels sure that the mind knows things, he has not 
the faintest notion how it knows them. 

From the inaccurate and indefinite knowledge of minds proper 
to the unscientific, one may take refuge in psychology ; and for a 
more satisfactory knowledge of the external world one may turn 
to the various physical sciences. In entering upon the study of 



ii 



The Mind and the World 5 

these, the plain man does no great violence to the ways of think- 
ing to which he has been accustomed. He does not change his 
whole point of view. He merely learns to do more accurately 
and carefully what he has done before, namely, to observe, com- 
pare, classify, and infer. He is still in a world of material things, 
in the one case, and in a world of minds which know things, in 
the other. 

For instance, as a plain man, he has known plants and ani- 
mals. He has observed them more or less narrowly, and he has 
some rather loosely generalized information regarding them. In 
becoming a botanist or a zoologist, he collects his information 
more planfiilly and arranges it more critically. But he goes 
through no intellectual revolution in becoming a botanist or a 
zoologist. As a plain man he knew something about plants and 
animals ; as a scientist he knows much more ; but his knowledge 
is of the same general nature. There, in the real world, are real 
objects which he is to examine and upon which he may experi- 
ment. The results obtained by the botanist and the zoologist are 
sufficiently intelligible to him, even if he be a very poor scientist 
himself. They are expressed in a language of which he has 
always known at least the rudiments. 

And the physiologist assumes, just as he has been in the habit 
of doing, an external world, in which are a number of organized 
bodies, forming a part of a real system of things. He seeks to 
obtain a general knowledge of the peculiar phenomena presented 
by these bodies, and to fix their relations to the rest of the sys- 
tem. Every one knows something about physiology, even if he 
has never heard the word pronounced. One's ignorance may be 
profound, but even in that case it differs from that of the physi- 
ologist only in degree. The point of view is essentially the same. 
Lungs are lungs, and exist and function in a real external world 
among other real things, and the only problem is to discover how 
they conduct themselves there. Physiological truths do not lead 
one away from the ways of thinking to which one is accustomed 
in common life. Physiology has to do with external things in 
an external world ; it assumes that they can, under given condi- 
tions, be known ; and it troubles itself little about the meaning 
of externality or the nature of knowledge. 

It may here be objected that what has above been said of such 
sciences as botany, zoology, and physiology, can hardly be said 



6 llie Content of Consciousness 

of certain other sciences, such as chemistry and physics; nor, 
indeed, of the sciences lirst mentioned, in so far as they may be 
based upon the hitter. The chemist and the physicist seem to 
take leave of things as we know them, and to pass into a new and 
different world of things imperceptible to the senses. To the 
plain man the real external world consists of extended things 
which may be seen and touched. These things appear to be con- 
tinuous ; and, although they may be divided, the parts into 
which they may be divided are conceived as really parts, i.e. as 
fragments of the things, and as of the same general nature with 
them. But to the chemist and the physicist these realities have 
become appearances ; not the things themselves, but phenomena 
under which the real things, themselves imperceptible, make 
their presence evident to the observer. Is this the world of 
things in which the plain man finds himself, and in which he lives 
and moves and has his being ? 

But a closer scrutiny reveals that, although the material 
world is to the man of science by no means the same thing that 
it is to the unscientific, yet it is a world of essentially the same 
nature, and it is not difficult for the plain man to understand the 
language in which it is explained to him. The atom, for 
example, is supposed to exist in space and to move about in 
space. It is not directly perceivable by sense, but it is conceived 
as though it and its motions were thus perceivable. Atoms are 
thought of as material things ; it is assumed that they can be 
indirectly known; and no such questions are raised as those of 
the nature or possibility of knowledge, the nature of space, and 
what is meant by existence or reality. 

There is much in the experience of the unlearned man that 
can make comprehensible to him the views of the nature of 
matter held by the chemist. He has long known that things 
consist of parts which are, at least under some circumstances, 
invisible. Every time that he approaches an object from a dis- 
tance, it is made manifest to him that parts become visible which 
were not visible a moment before. The animated speck which 
crawls away before his eyes, he infers to be an insect, and to be 
as complicated as insects usually are. That he cannot discern 
its parts does not prevent him from believing that such exist. 
Nor is his belief arbitrary and ungrounded ; it rests upon his 
experiences of things and the variations of things in his experi- 



The Mind and the World 7 

ence. Moreover, lie has had abundant opportunity to remark the 
fact that what appears to the sense continuous when observed 
from a distance, may be recognized as presenting many a gap 
when seen from a nearer point. It is far from inconceivable to 
him that bodies which seem continuous should really be com- 
posed of atoms separated by considerable intervals. Finally, the 
thought that different combinations of atoms should exhibit dif- 
ferent properties does not strike him as surprising. He who has 
brewed a bowl of punch, or looked on at the manufacture of a 
pudding, has observed that things in combination do not have 
the same properties as the same things taken separately, and he 
can readily generalize this experience so as to make it cover cases 
which have not yet fallen within his experience, and even cases 
which can never enter his experience directly, but for the reality 
of which he has credible evidence of some sort. The plain man 
has already reasoned as do the chemist and the physicist, but he 
has not carried his reasonings so far, nor has he been as accurate 
and systematic. Had he not had such experiences as I have 
described, the doctrine of molecules and atoms would strike him 
as incomprehensible ; and, indeed, had the man of science not had 
such experiences, he would never have framed the hypothesis in 
question. There would have been lacking the basis demanded 
by scientific hypotheses, the foundation in experienced fact with- 
out which they can have no sort of significance. 

The truth that the man of science occupies essentially the 
same standpoint as the plain man may be illustrated, not merely 
by a reference to those sciences which have to do directly with 
existing things, whether they be regarded as perceptible or as 
imperceptible to the senses ; it may be illustrated by a reference 
to the abstract sciences as well. Some mathematical knowledge 
is possessed by every civilized man who is not intellectually 
deficient. He can count things, add and subtract, multiply and 
divide. These same things are done by the mathematician, and, 
with the aid of an ingenious system of symbols, are done in a very 
complicated way. The plain man reflects but little upon the 
nature of numbers ; his aim is to use them. The relativity of 
number he has learned at a very early age ; he knows that the 
same bit of wood may be both a yard long and three feet long, 
and that one dozen is the equivalent of twelve units. But it does 
not occur to him to ask himself precisely what happens in his 



8 The Content of Consciousness 

mind when it conceives of something as a unit. The science of 
arithmetic does not, or at least it need not, trouble itself about 
such matters a whit more than he. We all know, in a certain 
dim, unanalytic way, what we mean by a unit and by the successive 
addition of units. We know what it is to grasp together as a 
whole a number of individuals, to separate a whole into its con- 
stituent parts, and to compare two wholes and find them equal or 
unequal. The arithmetician may assume this knowledge to be 
present in the mind of the man whom he undertakes to instruct ; 
and may, proceeding upon this basis, show him how to repeat in 
more and more complicated ways, operations which, in a simple 
form, he has been accustomed to perform from his very childhood. 
If the pupil desires, not so much to perform the operations in 
question, as rather to pry curiously into their ultimate nature, he 
may be referred to the psychologist, the logician, or the meta- 
physician. The arithmetician is in no way bound to answer 
questions touching such topics as these. 

The same thing is true in geometry. Every man has some 
notion of what is meant by a point, a line, a surface, and a solid, 
however abortive may prove his attempts at definition. He knows 
that even a very small surface is not to be confounded with a point, 
and that a narrow strip of surface is not a line. He is willing to 
affirm with confidence that the thinnest sheet of ice has two faces, 
and not one only. The axioms assumed by the geometrician 
appear to him reasonable, because he seems to find them verified 
in his experience ; and, indeed, he seems to himself always to 
have known them, although it would not have occurred to him to 
state them in that general form. He can see that a straiglit line 
is shorter than a crooked one joining two points. When he con- 
templates a triangle before him, he sees, and he was able to see 
before he studied the mathematics, that the sum of the three 
internal angles is greater than any one or any two of those angles 
taken alone. The exact determination of the sum of the three 
angles, and, in general, the exact determination of any geometrical 
relations save the very simplest, can only come when he has had 
the proper schooling ; although individuals may differ rather 
widely in their conception of the proper meaning to be given to 
the phrase, " the very simplest relations," and some may be able 
to see at a glance what others can only be brought to see with a 
good deal of assistance. 



The Mind and the World 9 

There is, then, no absolute line dividing the geometrical 
knowledge possessed by all normal minds from that possessed 
by the geometrician. The knowledge of the latter is more exact, 
more exactly expressed, and it covers a far wider field, since it is 
possible by the aid of scientific methods to perceive a multitude 
of relations which it is beyond the power of the untutored mind 
to grasp. But the fundamental notions of geometry are taken 
from common experience, and the world of space and of things in 
space remains essentially the same, after one has become familiar 
with geometrical reasonings, that it was before. The geometri- 
cian is under no obligations to ask himself how it is possible 
for the mind to know extended things, to enter into speculations 
regarding the nature of space, or even to attempt to solve the con- 
tradictions which seem to stare him in the face when he reflects 
upon the continuousness of space and the possibility of its infinite 
divisibility. All these problems remain, and call for a solution, 
after the geometrician has done his work. But there is no good 
reason why they should be laid upon the shoulders of the mathe- 
matician, nor does it seem that they can be solved by the employ- 
ment of the methods which he is accustomed to use in his work. 

If we turn from such sciences as we have been discussing to 
the science of psychology, we find that the case is in no wise 
different. We have seen that a certain amount of psychological 
knowledge is possessed by the plain man before he has made any 
attempt at scientific accuracy, but we have also seen that his 
knoAvledge of the mind cannot but be fragmentary and indefinite, 
unsystematic and unsatisfactory. It must differ from that pos- 
sessed by the psychologist somewhat as the knowledge of plants 
common to intelligent persons who take an interest in them differs 
from the knowledge of the botanist, or as the mathematical knowl- 
edge of common life differs from that of the mathematician. The 
difference is here, as in the other cases, a difference rather of degree 
than of kind. 

This may be clearly seen from the descriptions given, in the 
handbooks of psychology, of the way in which the plain man has 
attained to the psychological knowledge which he enjoys. We 
there find that the subject of our discussion has had recourse to 
introspection, that he has made use of the objective method, and 
that he has not confined himself to mere observation, but has 
sometimes experimented. Experience of his own conscious states 



10 The Content of Consciousness 

has given him the key which is to make significant the expressions 
and actions of other men and of the brutes. He has certainly 
observed these expressions and actions, and has framed a more 
general notion of mind than he could have done by a mere exami- 
nation of his own mental processes. And every time that he has 
sought by persuasion, or by any other means, to produce a given 
mental state in another, he has employed experiment, as does the 
galopin who rides on the back platform of the bob-tailed car, at a 
personal inconvenience to himself, with the avowed purpose of 
getting the driver " wild." Of course, such introspection as he 
has attempted has been blind and instinctive ; his observation 
has been loose and inaccurate ; his experiments were undertaken 
for no scientific purpose, and some of them sin in all sorts of ways 
against the canons of scientific experiment. Nevertheless, they 
remain introspection, observation, and experiment. The differ- 
ence between the plain man and the psychologist does not lie in 
the fact that the latter uses any method peculiar to himself, 
esoteric and above the comprehension of the unlearned. It is 
simply a case of the difference everywhere found between the 
scientific and the unscientific, between the man who applies 
methods carefully and seeks accurate and exhaustive knowledge 
of a subject, and the man who feels his way blindly, going only 
so far as he is compelled to go by immediate practical needs. 
The knowledge of mind gained by the plain man is loose and 
vague, more or less inconsistent, and very limited in extent. 
Yet it is, as far as it goes, a knowledge of mind, not different in 
kind from that of the psychologist, and obtained in the same way. 

Now that psychology is emerging from that ill-defined medley 
which has passed by the name of philosophy, and is taking its 
place as a distinct discipline, it is gradually coming to be accepted 
that the psychologist must occupy much the same standpoint as 
the ordinary man. I do not, of course, mean that he must be as 
loose and careless in his thinking, but merely that he must be 
scientific rather than metaphysical, accepting without question the 
assumptions upon which the natural sciences rest, and investigating 
the phenomena of mind as they investigate material phenomena. 

It is only necessary to compare the psychology of a generation 
or two ago with that of the present day, to see how strong is the 
current which sets for psychology as natural science. The change 
is both natural and necessary ; it is only another instance of the 



The Mind and the World 11 

division of labor which always follows the successful exploitation 
of the various fields of investigation, and of which the history of 
science furnishes so many instances. It is coming to be seen that 
the psychologist, like the student of the physical sciences, may 
legitimately restrict the scope of his investigations ; that he may 
refuse to attempt the solution even of problems which naturally 
suggest themselves to one laboring in that particular field, if it is 
not necessary to solve them in the attainment of the definite ends 
which the psychologist sets out to reach. There seems the more 
reason for his position when it is seen that the problems referred 
to — which may, as a class, be termed epistemological or meta- 
physical — cannot be solved without an apparent repudiation, 
certainly without a thorough analysis and revision, of those 
assumptions upon the basis of which psychological investigations 
more and more commonly, and very conveniently, proceed. 

In harmony with this position the psychologist assumes an 
external real world, the world of matter and motion. In this 
world there are organized bodies presenting certain peculiar phe- 
nomena which he regards as indications of mental action. He 
accepts a plurality of minds distinct from each other and from the 
system of material things, each standing in a peculiar and intimate 
relation to one body. Each mind knows directly its own states, 
and knows everything else by inference from those states, receiving 
messages along certain bodily channels and reacting along others. 
Upon this basis he strives to give an accurate account of the con- 
tents of minds and to trace the history of their development. He 
stands upon the same ground as the ordinary man, and, as has 
been said above, he follows the same methods in his investigations, 
making use of introspection, observation, and experiment. He 
applies the methods in a broader and more scientific way; he is 
clearer, and more exact and thorough ; but he remains a student 
of " natural science." However he may modify, as a result of his 
studies, his views of minds and of their relation to a material 
world, he still holds to the existence of distinct individual minds 
in certain relations to such a world and through that to each other. 
He conceives each as shut up to its representations of things, and 
dependent upon messages conveyed to it from without, as does the 
disciple of Locke. Ideas are, to him, like images in a mirror, 
numerically distinct from the things which they represent, and of 
which they give information. 



12 The Content of Consciousness 

In all this there is a distinct advance upon the knowledge of 
minds possessed by the unscientific. Not only does the careful 
and systematic application of the methods of investigation result 
in a much larger, better established, and better arranged mass of 
information, but the clear statement of the assumptions upon whicli 
the science rests is an important gain. Somewhat as the knowl- 
edge of the child differs from that of the man does tiie knowledge 
of the plain man differ from that of the psychologist. The dis- 
tinction between the self and the external world wdiich exists 
vaguely in the childish mind has grown more definite in the 
mature mind, indefinite as it may be even there. In the mind of 
the psychologist such distinctions have attained a still greater 
degree of definiteness. 

For example, whereas the child scarcely thought about his 
ideas of things at all, or distinguished between his mind and his 
body, or the minds and bodies of others, to the man these distinc- 
tions have become familiar. He now regards his ideas of things 
as distinct from things, and as, in a sense, representative of things. 
He knows that he may have false ideas of things, and that it is 
quite possible for the idea and the thing to be very different. He 
knows that ideas come to him through the avenues of the senses, 
and that disturbances of the sense may cause a modification of the 
idea, while the temporary or permanent closing of the avenue 
causes the temporary or permanent loss of the corresponding set 
of messages from the outer world. He regards his ideas as in his 
mind, and he is very apt to look upon his mind as, not merely re- 
lated to, but in his body — preferably in his head. Moreover, he 
distinguishes vaguely between himself, a something he can scarcely 
even attempt to define, and the ideas of which he is conscious. 
But he does not confound this self with the body, or with any 
external thing. He has thus arrived at a consciousness of two 
worlds rather strongly contrasted, an inner and an outer ; nor is 
his state of mind to be confused v/ith the far more indefinite state 
of the childish mind. Certain distinctions, before merely implicit, 
have emerged into the foreground of consciousness. 

But it is to be remarked that, altliough the plain man distin- 
guishes between his ideas of things and tlie things which they 
represent, he is guilty of an inconsistency in vaguely believing that 
he somehow knows external things directly, and not merely 
through his ideas. He is quite ready, it is true, to assent to the 



The Mbid and the World 13 

general statement that he and others may have false ideas, and 
may sometimes be deceived about things. He may have experienced 
hallucinations, he has certainly had dreams, and he has noticed that 
the same object may look and feel differently when presented 
to the sense in different ways. It is because he has had these and 
certain other experiences that he is impelled to make the distinc- 
tion between external things and our representative ideas of them. 
But he has not reflected sufficiently upon such experiences ; and 
when he stands in front of an object, within a reasonable distance 
of it, it does not occur to him to regard the object as merely an ex- 
ternal cause of an internal experience — which may, theoretically 
at least, be a false and misleading experience. He is confident that 
he du-ectly knows the object out there before him, and the inter- 
vention of a representative is overlooked. 

Here the psychologist is more thoroughgoing. He, too, 
distinguishes between external things and our ideas of them, 
making the ideas representative of the objects. But he realizes 
that, when he has done this, he must not again confound the 
objects and their representatives, and thus lose the distinction 
which he has drawn. He insists that the external world of things 
must in every instance be regarded as numerically distinct from 
the copies of it built up in indi^ddual minds ; and that, conse- 
quently, all his own experiences, however vividly they may seem 
to give him immediate knowledge of external things, are never- 
theless merely representatives of the things in question. In other 
words, the psychologist admits that the objects of which he is 
immediately conscious, and which by the plain man are assumed 
to be external things, are not really constituent parts of the 
external world, but are, so to speak, duplicates of these, which 
exist in the mind itself, and merely stand for what is external. 

The plain man who looks at an object before him and feels 
impelled to believe that he is directly conscious of the thing out 
there in space, may be thrown into perplexity by the very simple 
experiment of pressing gently upon the side of one of his eyeballs. 
The object seen is at once doubled. It is fair to ask him 
whether both of these things seen are the real object, or, if not, 
whether the one has any better claim to that title tlian the 
other. If he does not see the real object when his eyes are 
tampered with, but sees only images, he may well ask himself 
whether what he saw before was the real object, or merely an 



14 The Content of Consciousness 

image of it. The psychologist solves such problems by declaring 
all the objects of which we are immediately conscious to be mere 
representatives of what is without, but maintains that the repre- 
sentatives obtained tlirough the sense-organs, under certain normal 
conditions, give truer information regarding the world beyond 
than those gained under other conditions. It is of course incum- 
bent upon him to support this position by evidence, and evidence 
of a kind he can undoubtedly furnish. 

But there is still another way in which the psychologist's view 
of the mind differs, or ought to differ, from that of the unscien- 
tific. The latter has gotten so far as to recognize the existence of 
ideas, of conscious states, and to distinguish them from external 
objects, as we have seen. But he believes vaguely in the existence 
of a self^ which is distinct from any or all of its conscious states, 
which in some sense underlies them, or has them, and which is 
the agent in knowing, feeling, and willing. How this self or " I " 
knows or acts, he does not pretend to say ; even what it is, he can- 
not make intelligible to himself or to others ; but he believes that 
it is, and that it should not be confounded with the things which 
it knows or upon which it exercises its activity. There is, of 
course, some danger of injustice in attributing to a man beliefs 
which have never emerged in his mind to any degree of clearness 
and definiteness, but it seems safe to say that the plain man believes, 
vaguely and indefinitely, in the sort of a self indicated above. He 
thinks that he is conscious of something of the kind, and the lan- 
guage which we have all inherited and daily employ is well adapted 
to foster such a belief. We say : " I think," " I feel," " I will," and 
the " I" in our thought vaguely stands for a something different 
from all mental states whatever. It is a something big with 
mystery and possible misconception. 

To the psychologist, however, a mind is, or should be, nothing 
more than a transcript of the external world supplemented by 
certain conscious states not supposed to have their protot3'i)es 
without, feelings of pleasure, pain, etc. If we use the word "idea" 
to cover broadly all those things, which, according to the less 
scientific view, the mind "has," we may say that the psychologist 
should regard the mind as wholly composed of ideas, and should 
regard his task as accomplished when he has satisfactorily analyzed 
and arranged these. A mind is, of course, a very complex little 
world, and the phenomena it presents are by no means easy to 



The Mind and the World 15 

analyze and classify. Some things in it seem to stand out clearly; 
some remain, after our best efforts, dim and vague. It is quite 
conceivable that certain things, commonly supposed to have their 
being in such a world, should turn out, upon investigation, to be 
mere chimeras. It is not difficult, in the obscurity which still 
covers much of our mental life, to confound one thing with another, 
to create a phantasm, or to seek diligently for the solution of a 
problem which should never have been proposed for solution. 
These truths the psychologist should acknowledge ; and the diffi- 
culties of his task should not lead him to jump to unintelligible 
or merely tautological explanations of obscure mental phenomena, 
nor despair of analyzing into its elements what has heretofore 
resisted his efforts at analysis. He need not deny the conscious- 
ness of self experienced by the plain man and the psychologist 
alike ; but he may legitimately expect to find it, when subjected 
to careful examination, a mental state, not wholly different from 
other mental states, and containing nothing hopelessly mysterious. 
He simply abandons his task when he introduces obscure meta- 
physical notions to piece out his incomplete psychological knowl- 
edge ; and in so far as he does this, he must renounce the claim 
to be, in any just sense of the word, a man of science. 

I have said that the psychologist does, or should^ regard minds 
as consisting wholly of conscious states, and it has been necessary 
to speak thus guardedly because there are still not a few psycholo- 
gists who cling to an older and a less scientific way of regarding 
the mind. But the scope and methods of the science of psychol- 
ogy are coming to be more and more definitely limited ; and to 
my mind, at least, there is little doubt that the psychologist of the 
future will regard it as a work of supererogation to enter upon 
the discussion of the nature or functions of any self, or ego, or 
"knower" which cannot be resolved into a complex of mental 
elements. That the current is running in this direction appears 
to be abundantly evident. As I purpose somewhat later to revert 
to this topic, and give definite reasons why the psychologist 
should abandon the older view, I shall say no more upon the 
subject at present. 

From the foregoing, it is plain that the differences between 
the knowledge of minds common to all intelligent persons and 
that peculiar to the student of psychology, are sufficiently 
important. But it is also clear that a recourse to psychology 



IG Tlie Content of Consciousness 

will not solve all the problems which arise out of the experience 
of things which we all possess. The psychologist describes the 
development of a consciousness, and endeavors to give an accurate 
account of its contents ; but he assumes, as does every student of 
natural science, the existence of a world of material things in rela- 
tion to our mental states. He may tell us how we come to build 
up a mental image of a system of extended things, but he is no 
more bound to tell us what is the ultimate nature of space than 
is the physicist. He pictures the development of a consciousness 
in time, and he tries to explain how we come to form the notion 
of time, but we have no right to ask him what time is, or 
whether it is in itself subjective or objective. His work touches 
much more closely, it is true, such problems as these, than does 
the work of the physicist ; we feel impelled to ask him his opinion 
upon such points at many stages ot his progress. But he has a 
right to refuse us an answer, on the ground that he is prosecuting 
studies in a natural science, that his science rests, like others, 
upon assumptions which may be further analyzed, but that it is 
more convenient to refer the carrying out of such analyses to a 
special discipline, which is similarly related to many sciences. 
As a psychologist, he is justified in putting such things aside, and 
in remaining upon the plane of the common understanding, the 
plane of natural science. 

There is, of course, much that is vague in the thinking of the 
man who rests wholly on the plane of natural science. The 
physicist may have no very clear notion of all that he means 
by matter and energy, and yet he may be a good physicist. He 
may experiment with ingenuity, and observe and record phenom- 
ena with accuracy. And the psychologist may have the vaguest 
of notions as to the whole connotation of the word " mind," or of 
the phrase "a material world," and yet he maybe a good psycholo- 
gist and materially add to our knowledge of minds. If he has 
not carried on with some measure of success the sort of reflective 
thinking demanded in metaphysics, he will probably mix from 
time to time with his psychology more or less crude material that 
is not strictly psychological. But this is on his part a work of 
supererogation. He has the right, as has the physicist, to work 
in his own field, and to make use of some concepts which he has 
not completely analyzed. 



CHAPTER II 
THE INADEQUACY OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT 

It is easily apparent that the position taken by the plain man 
and by the psychologist touching the relation of minds to an 
external world calls for further criticism, and cannot be regarded 
as final except within the field of psychology. It is, indeed, a 
convenient fiction, and must not be accepted as though it were 
a literal statement of the truth. Upon examination it turns out, 
when taken literally, to be flatly self-contradictory, and thus to 
annihilate itself. And since this position is natural to all men, 
so long as their thinking remains upon the plane of the common 
understanding, and the need of subjecting it to further criticism 
is evident only to the few who have made some progress in reflec- 
tive thought, it is well worth while to spend a little time in the 
examination of the psychological standpoint, and to make the 
above-mentioned contradiction stand out with distinctness. 

We have seen that this view of the mind and the world 
assumes that each mind has only its representative images of 
things, and cannot directly attain to the things themselves. 
When it asks how a given mind comes to have a knowledge of 
an external thing, it concerns itself with the messages that have 
been conveyed to the mind by means of the bodily senses — with 
the materials, so to speak, out of which the image has been built 
up. It describes in detail the process of building up such an 
image, and distinguishing sharply between the image and the 
eorresponding thing, it maintains that the mind knows only so 
much about the thing as is contained in this image and in other 
images obtained in a similar way. It admits that, given an 
image in the absence of the thing (an hallucination), the mind 
will have absolutely no way of knowing the thing to be absent 
except by referring to its other experiences and assuming this one, 
as abnormal, to be a false representative, and without a corre- 
sponding reality behind it. In other words, it shuts the mind up 
c 17 



18 TJie Content of Consciousness 

to its own circle of consciousness, and makes the external world 
present to it only by proxy. The outer world, as the mind imme- 
diately knows it^ is a complex mental experience, built up out of 
mental elements, and not the real outer world at all. Thus 
the very idea " outer " is, to the mind possessing it, only a some- 
thing in consciousness — an inner representative of genuine ex- 
ternality. It is not a real " outer," but merely its image. 

Let us try by the aid of an illustration to get a clear notion of 
this view of the mind. Let us imagine a man imprisoned in a 
doorless and windowless cell, whose heavy walls shut out every 
aspect of the luminous and resonant world without. He has 
always been thus a prisoner, in solitude and darkness, and in 
a silence broken only by the click of the telegraphic key which is 
the sole avenue by which messages may arrive from the unknown 
beyond the walls which encompass him. He can grope his way 
about his cell, and has, hence, some experience of space and of 
things in space. He can make sounds which he can himself hear. 
And he has, in addition, the series of sounds mentioned as pro- 
duced independently of him, and constituting messages from 
another world. To such elements is his experience limited. 

What sort of a world can he build up out of such experiences^ 
and how must he proceed in its construction ? It is evident 
that he is not in the position of one who has thus been im- 
prisoned after having enjoyed an extended experience of things 
as they appear to those who walk abroad. He is not possessed 
of the secret which makes a message at once recognizable as a 
message, and turns a series of meaningless sounds into a wealth 
of information regarding, not sounds merely, but also a variety 
of other things which bear little resemblance to them. It re- 
quires a certain amount of information to be able to recognize 
that a given experience is a representative of something beyond 
itself ; a message does not announce itself as such under all 
circumstances ; and one may gaze long upon the cross-section 
of a bit of cord without being able to guess, from that single 
experience taken by itself, what manner of thing it is to which 
this little plane surface belongs, or, indeed, whether it belongs 
to anything at all. One cannot have the least idea that a suc- 
cession of sounds is a message, and has come from witliout, so 
long as one knows absolutely nothing about it save that it is 
found within. The Prisoners in the Den, which Phito has 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 19 

described for us, could not know the shadows upon which their 
eyes were fixed to be shadows, so long as they had no experience 
of real things with which to contrast them. 

Thus our prisoner must build up the world of his knowledge 
out of such experiences as he actually possesses, and we must 
be careful, in picturing his condition, not to attribute to him 
possibilities which can arise only out of the possession of the 
larger experience which we ourselves possess. He has some 
knowledge of space and of things in space, and it is conceivable 
that, by what would be to him a bold flight of the constructive 
imagination, he might imagine, and perhaps come to believe in 
the reality of, a much larger material world than that with which 
he is immediately familiar. He could conceive the theoretic 
possibility of his passing the barriers which hem him in, and of 
finding other real things of the same general nature as the things 
he knows. In doing this he would be doing what we all do 
when we speculate regarding the possibility of a boundless ma- 
terial universe, or create in imagination an unseen world of 
atoms and molecules in relation to the world of things we im- 
mediately perceive. And having perceived that sounds made 
to originate in one part of his cell could be heard in another part, 
and that sounds may give some indication of the nature of the 
occurrence that brings them into being, he might even come to 
refer those sounds, for which he was not himself responsible, 
to imagined occurrences in the outer world which he had con- 
ceived, and recognize them as in a certain sense messages. 

How far human ingenuity could go in building up, upon so 
slender a basis of experienced fact, an idea of an outer world 
bearing a resemblance to the real outer world which surrounds 
our prisoner, it is perhaps hardly profitable to attempt to guess. 
That human ingenuity may do much in extending the limits of 
knowledge beyond the confines of the immediately perceptible, all 
who have some acquaintance with the results attained by science 
must admit. But certain things should be carefully noted : — 

In the first place, it is clear that the subject of our illustration 
must find in his own actual experiences some sort of justification 
for the transition to an unseen world which he now conceives as 
beyond them. He must reason by analogy, passing from like to 
like, from a limited to a possible wider experience not dissimilar 
from the former. Did he not find in his experience some fact 



20 The Content of Consciousness 

wliich could best be explained by the assumption of such a world 
— I mean really explained, as facts are explained within his 
experience — tlie larger world would remain to him, if he framed 
the conception of it at all, a mere dream. It could not be a legiti- 
mate object of belief. 

In the second place, it is clear that the larger world arrived 
at by inference cannot contain any element not present in some 
form in the little world of the experiences which we are supposing 
to be actually present. The man who has come to believe in it 
has not created a new world, he has merely extended in thought 
the world in which he finds himself. Had he not already an 
experience of space and of things in space, did he not know by 
actual experience what is meant by spaces, he would not have the 
elements which, fitted together, constitute his idea of a larger 
world. Thus we see that the larger world of which we are now 
speaking cannot possibly be a world of colors. No triumph of 
ingenuity can transport our captive within " the borders of light." 
However he may exercise his ingenuity to enlarge the world in 
which he is condemned to live, it must remain forever a world of 
essentially the same character. How could he possibly so put 
together experiences of sound or of touch as to make them truly 
representative, not of other sounds or touches, or combinations of 
such, but of a something so diverse as colors ? Here we find a 
gulf, which must remain forever impassable, a gulf which he can- 
not even recognize as a gulf, for there is to him nothing at all in 
that direction, not even a void — there is, indeed, not so much as 
a direction, there is nothing. 

Now the isolation of the mind, as conceived by the psycholo- 
gist, is far more complete than that of the hypothetical inhabitant 
of the cell. It is, in fact, cut off from the external world as a 
whole, as our prisoner is cut off from the world of colors. There 
is simply no bridge leading from the inner world to the outer. 
That this is not an extreme statement of the case it needs only 
a moment's reflection to reveal ; although the fact appears at first 
sight to be contradicted by the existence of the several avenues of 
sense, furnishing to the mind a mass of information of a very 
varied nature. One is tempted to picture the mind, not as 
imprisoned in a gloomy cell, and laboriously working out for 
itself, by the aid of analogical reasoning, a hypothetic world, 
which constitutes a somewhat shadowy continuation of the world 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 21 

of immediately experienced fact ; but rather as the inhabitant of 
a fair mansion well provided with windows on every side, and as 
being able to gaze freely upon a varied and extended landscape. 

But this impulse is checked at once by the thought of what 
the psychologist's position really implies. The mind is, he 
teaches, quite shut up, so far as its immediate knowledge goes, 
to its own ideas ; and though it may think of an external world, 
it is wholly impossible that it should look out of the windows and 
into the world beyond, at any moment of its existence. That 
there are such things as windows it can only know by inference ; 
the windows are not immediately perceived. Nothing is immedi- 
ately perceived save sensations and other mental elements, which 
we may indicate by the use of the term "idea." The fact that 
these elements are of diverse sorts, and that they may be built 
up into complex constructions, does not in itself prove that they 
are something representative of a world without, and that they 
furnish some sort of a picture of such a world. A complex of 
ideas is, after all, only a complex of ideas ; and the belief that 
there is in existence anything beyond the ideas and their actual 
and possible combinations, should, if it is to be a rational belief, 
be founded upon some sort of evidence. 

Such evidence would be furnished, if, for example, a mind 
could have immediate knowledge of some external occurrence 
resulting in a stimulation of one of the bodily organs of sense, 
could have similar knowledge of this bodily organ and its con- 
dition of stimulation, and could perceive a conscious sensation to 
be the effect of such external occurrences. Given such an experi- 
ence, there would be at least a starting-point for further rea- 
sonings. Sensations not thus perceived to be the result of 
external happenings could be inferred to be such. And a direct 
comparison of things external and internal in a few instances 
might furnish material for a general theory regarding the rela- 
tions existing between the two worlds, and the similarity or 
diversity of nature obtaining between them. Could one from 
time to time apply an observant eye to the peep-hole in the 
curtain which separates the stage, upon which our conscious life 
enacts its drama, from the theatre of the larger world beyond, 
even fugitive glimpses would serve to show that the stage is but 
a limited part of a larger whole, and stands in relation to the 
rest. But such a glimpse of the external world the psychologist 



22 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

denies us, as he must, when he has once made and carried out 
with impartial thoroughness the distinction between ideas and 
the things for which they stand, mental representatives and the 
realities which they are supposed to represent. 

Yet even where all direct knowledge of the external world is 
denied, it is conceivable that a mind might, under certain con- 
ditions, obtain some knowledge of an external world of a certain 
sort. It is, however, very important to remark these conditions, 
and to remark also the sort of an external world that could be 
reached. We have seen that the man in the cell could conceivably 
extend his knowledge beyond the world of his cell, by reasoning 
in a legitimate way upon a basis of experienced fact. But we 
have seen also that the outer world must be for him a continua- 
tion and extension of the world he knows, not something quite 
different in kind. It must be something really capable of repre- 
sentation by elements actually given in his experience, and what 
is not thus given, even in its elements, cannot be for him an outer 
world at all. 

The same thing is true in the present instance. If, for 
example, we conceive of a mind as occupying a certain portion 
of space, as containing ideas which are extended things — not 
mere non-extended representatives of extended things, but really 
extended — then it is quite conceivable that a mind may, stand- 
ing upon a basis of actual experience, represent to itself, in 
some intelligible sense of those words, an external world lying 
beyond itself. It knows what extension means ; it knows what 
it means when it speaks of things as beyond each other. It can, 
by a mental construction, conceive symbolically, as we always do 
conceive symbolically, immense spaces not given in any immediate 
experience. But the external world thus conceived would not be 
a world of a wholly new and different kind from that directly 
known. It would be, as was the outer world of the man in the 
cell, a continuation of the little world directly perceived. It 
goes without saying that such a world must not be a merely 
gratuitous assumption. Tliere must be some good reason for 
believing it to exist, or the belief has no justification. More- 
over, the justification must be found within the little world 
which serves as the sole basis for the whole construction. 

Now it is of the first importance to remark that no such 
conditions as the one adduced are fulfilled iu the conception of 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 23 

the mind furnished us by the psychologist. He does not con- 
ceive of the mind as occupying a small portion of space, and 
as passing in its knowledge beyond the limits of that portion 
in the manner described. He does not mean by an external 
world a mere continuation of the internal world, and a world 
of the same general character. Such a continuation of the 
world of ideas would give us only a more extended circle of 
ideas, not a world of things supposed to differ in kind from 
ideas of whatever sort. The psychologist usually tells us, for 
example, that the inner world exists only in time, while the outer 
world exists both in time and in space. In other words, nothing 
within the mind is extended, but material things do possess 
this property. But if this be so, it is fair to ask, How can the 
mind find even a starting-point from which it may represent to 
itself in any way a world of extended things ? It may build to- 
gether into a system the ideas that it has ; it may observe their 
connections and the order in which they succeed each other ; it 
may even look forward with confidence to experiencing in a 
different way ideas which it has not as yet experienced except 
as images in the imagination ; it may thus extend the world of 
its experiences by believing in the possibility of further experiences. 
But in all this there is not the least justification for passing from 
a world of actual or possible experiences to a something of a quite 
different kind. For such a procedure there is not that first founda- 
tion in experience without which the whole fabric of one's reason- 
ing must, in every case, become as unsubstantial as a city in the 
clouds. 

Moreover, since there is in the circle of ideas no element 
which can, in an intelligible sense of the word, represent an ex- 
tended thing, there is not only no justification for an extension of 
knowledge to a realm beyond consciousness, but there is not even 
the possibility of framing the least conception of what such an ex- 
tension may mean. The man in the cell may, in imagination, 
extend the little world of the things which he knows beyond the 
limits given in his experience, though he may doubt whether he 
is justified in believing in the existence of such an outer world. 
Still, he at least means something when he conceives it. His mind 
is not a mere blank. But if his experience furnished him with no 
knowledge of extension whatever, he would be as unable even to 
think of such an outer world as he is now to conceive the world of 



24 The Content of Consciousness 

light and colors. Thus it is with the hypothetical mind of the 
psychologist. It cannot even conceive the possibility of an '' outer " 
world which is not really an " inner," a mere distinction within the 
circle of its ideas. Not only is there no justification for an advance, 
but there is not even a direction in which there may be an advance. 
There is not a limit, as we ordinarily conceive of a limit ; there is 
simply nothing. And what has been said of extension may be 
said of any other quality attributed to the outer world which is 
Vv^holly denied to the inner. There is no conceivable way in which 
a knowledge of it may be attained by a mind circumstanced as is 
the one we have been picturing. For such a mind it is incon- 
ceivable that the external world should exist at all. 

Such must be the condition of a mind shut up to an immedi- 
ate knowledge of its own ideas solely. Its images of things 
cannot be to it images giving information regarding things be- 
yond them. They must themselves be things ; the only things 
it knows, unless we include other things of the same kind, 
reached by an inference from these, in the manner indicated 
above. In contemplating its condition of complete insulation, we 
are struck by the oddity of the fact that this whole doctrine 
rests upon reasonings in which it is assumed that the mind is 
not shut up to its own experiences, but directly knows an exter- 
nal world of things. The contradiction is palpable and unmis- 
takable ; between premises and conclusion there is an abyss 
which may be concealed by obscurity and confusion of thought, 
but which cannot be bridged by any legitimate procedure. The 
argument supposed to yield the conclusion in question may be 
set forth briefly as follows : — 

A man looks at his own body, the body of his neighbor, and some 
material object, in front of which both are standing, and lie seems 
to himself to be immediately conscious of all three. He grants 
his neighbor a knowledge of the object, reasoning as I have in- 
dicated in the chapter preceding, and distinguislies between 
tliis man's knowledge of the object and the object itself. The 
former he makes a representative of the latter, connects it in 
thought with the man's brain, and admits that it may even not 
wholly resemble the object as he sees it. He holds that the man 
is not directly conscious of the object itself, but infers it through 
the representative image. He then applies the same reasoning to 
himself, and concludes that he is liimself not really conscious of 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 25 

the three objects with which he started, but only of representative 
images. Through such images he must infer the whole outer 
world — his own body, other men, other things. 

But if he is not really conscious of his own body, the other 
man's body, and the real object, what becomes of his reasoning ? 
Of what is the other man's image representative, and with what is 
it connected? Is it representative of an external object? The 
object which it has been assumed to represent is now seen to be 
an image in his own consciousness, and there is not a shadow of 
evidence that it represents any other. With what brain is it 
connected ? The brain belonging to that body which is under 
observation ? That body, too, is now seen to be his own image, 
and is relegated to consciousness. And what do his own images 
represent, and where are they ? His image of the object cannot 
represent that object seen out there in front of his body. That 
object is his image, if he is shut up to images, and his body as 
perceived is another image in his consciousness with the object. 
The real object, the real body, are things to be inferred. They 
are not open to direct inspection. His image of the thing 
must not be referred to the brain, which belongs to the body of 
whose existence he is directly aware. It must be referred to a 
brain in a totally different world. Where look for evidence that 
it is connected with any such brain in any such body? Yet 
evidence must be adduced for all this. The doctrine that there 
is an external world, and that it is mirrored by a number of minds 
which are shut up to their own representations of it, is not usually 
advanced as a gratuitous fiction. It is supposed to rest upon evi- 
dence. Is not one conscious of one's own mental experiences? 
Can one not observe the relations of these to the material world ? 
Can one not arrive by analogical reasoning at some notion of the 
mental states of others, and apply one's results to one's self ? The 
appeal is to experience, to observation, and induction. And yet, 
if the conclusion of the argument be true, the foundation upon 
which it rests is a delusion. If one be really shut up to one's own 
mental states, one has never observed their relations to material 
things, and never inferred from changes in material things the 
mental states of another. It is a strange argument that rests upon 
an assumption which its conclusion declares to be false. 

The difficulty here pointed out is not assumed gratuitously. It 
is really inseparable from the psychological position both of the 



26 TJie Content of Consciousness 

plain man and of the psychologist, tliough it is forced into greater 
prominence by the superior consistency and clearness of the 
latter. The plain man distinguishes, in his loose fashion, be- 
tween a man's ideas of things and the things themselves, and he 
admits that if the ideas are not true representatives, their pos- 
sessor will not truly know the things. The psychologist makes 
more distinct the line of separation, and conceives the man's 
whole experience of an outer world to be a mere copy of what is 
external, describing in detail the elements of which it is built up, 
and the process of its formation. Both hold, explicitly or implic- 
itly, that we perceive directly the outer world, and that we do not 
so perceive it, but only infer it. The contradiction is there. It 
is embedded in the very structure of the psychological position, 
the standpoint of common thought and of natural science. Psy- 
chology is not called upon to solve it, for it does not concern 
psychology. The psychologist has done and still does excellent 
work while simply disregarding it. It may safely be left to the 
metaphysician. 

And the metaphysician, if he be wise, will not quarrel with 
the psychological standpoint. He will recognize its value as a 
basis for work of a certain kind, and he will object to the psychol- 
ogist's mixing with his psychology reasonings which, however 
true and valuable in themselves, serve only to darken counsel 
when mingled injudiciously with other things. He may, as meta- 
physician, point out where the difficulty really lies, show why the 
psychologist's assumption need not lead to error, and indicate 
how the results obtained by him are true even for metaphysics, 
when restated in certain ways. But he will regard such discus- 
sions as more or less out of place in a text-book of psychology, and 
will regret finding them there, much as he would regret finding 
metaphysical reflections introduced to any great extent in a 
treatise on physics. 

To what has been advanced in the pages preceding, exception 
may be taken in two very different ways. It may be claimed, on 
the one hand, that the psychologist need not take, even provision- 
ally, so untenable and inconsistent a position as the one described, 
but may restate his facts at the outset, rejecting what is untrue or 
misleading, as the metaphysician proposes to do. On the other 
hand, one may hold to the psychological standpoint in a somewhat 
modified form, and attempt to remove the contradiction by declar- 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 27 

ing that both the ideas and the things they represent are directly 
given in perception. 

Tlie first of these objections has already received an answer in 
the last chapter. I have there tried to show that the natural man 
finds himself in a world of things, and distinguishes between those 
things and his ideas of them. That he is not consistent and 
thoroughgoing in carrying out this distinction has been pointed 
out, and it has been shown that the psychologist goes further 
in this direction than he does. But it has been insisted that, how- 
ever psychology may improve upon the thinking of the natural 
man, it must, if it is to remain a natural science, remain upon the 
plane of the common understanding, accepting the standpoint of 
the natural man, a standpoint accepted by the natural sciences 
generally, and must avoid passing over to the sort of thinking 
which has by common consent come to be distinguished as meta- 
physical or epistemological. The two kinds of thinking are by 
no means the same, and one who does very good work upon the 
plane of natural science may still be incapable of doing good work 
of the latter kind, unless he has some degree of aptitude and has 
enjoyed some special training — a fact not infrequently over- 
looked, and sometimes with disastrous consequences. 

That the psychological view of the mind and the external 
world appeals to the common understanding as a natural one, 
must be evident to any one who has had the task of introducing 
classes of students to an acquaintance with the mental sciences. 
The distinction between ideas and the things they represent, the 
limiting the direct knowledge of the mind to the circle of its ideas, 
the description of the building up of a mental picture of an external 
world by the fitting together of the messages received from with- 
out — all this they find quite comprehensible and not incredible. 
It is only when they are asked to dissolve the very foundations of 
the world of ideas and things, with which they are uncritically 
familiar, by entering upon a metaphysical analysis which refuses 
to recognize such a view of things as ultimate, that they draw 
back in dismay. It is difficult for them to attain any intelligent 
comprehension of the new point of view. And this is equally true 
of those who are accustomed to work at all exclusively in any of 
the natural sciences. It is easy to see, when they make an excur- 
sion into philosophy, as they sometimes do, that they find it very 
hard not to carry over with them the assumptions upon which 



28 The Content of Consciousness 

their work has proceeded in their own field. They are apt to 
remain psychologists when they think they have become philoso- 
phers. They cannot shake off the old ways of thinking. 

Since this is so, and since psychology can express its truths 
without recasting them from the standpoint of the metaphysician, 
it is surely wiser for the psychologist to pursue his investigations 
as do the workers in other natural sciences. Much modern 
psychological work is done in this way, and I can see no good 
reason why all should not be. The psychologist should accept 
without question an external world ; should assume that his own 
ideas of things represent it, and can be proved by observation to 
represent it truly ; should infer from the actions of other bodies 
ideas more or less like his own, which are representatives of ex- 
ternal things as are his ideas. He should then, in harmony with 
the psychological fiction that no one is directly conscious of exter- 
nal real things, assume that each mind is shut up to its own repre- 
sentations ; that the world is mirrored in each consciousness, and 
that the pictures of it in different minds may differ. To him each 
mind's knowledge of the external world should mean the presence 
in it of such a picture — of such and such mental elements 
arranged in such and such ways. He can then set before himself 
the difficult but perfectly definite task of discovering just the 
elements present in a consciousness, and the method of their 
arrangement. He may describe the building up of a conscious- 
ness, and may relate everything in it to the system of real things 
in an intelligible way. His work is, in a real sense of the word, 
scientific, and resembles closely what scientific men are trying to 
do in other fields. It does not demand metaphysical reflection. 
The best results are to be obtained in psychology, I feel sure, by 
holding firmly to this scientific standpoint. 

It is true that this position is not taken by all psychologists, 
or even by all psychologists who give abundant evidence that they 
are deeply influenced in much of their work by the spirit and 
the methods of modern scientific investigation. Such men may 
object, as some do object, that in starting with such a view of the 
mind we are starting with a rather complicated theor}^ and not 
merely with a number of observed facts. A science, they may 
maintain, should result in a theory, not begin with one. The 
objection seems plausible, but I tliink it is sufficiently answered 
by saying that, in accepting the psychological standpoint, we are 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 29 

starting with what appear to the normal mind, untrained in meta- 
physical reflection, to be facts, and deserving of acceptance as 
such ; that until one has made some progress in the investigation 
of these, it is not clear what one should accept as ultimately true 
and what one should reject as misconception ; and that, here as 
everywhere, that method of investigation is the best which 
accomplishes the best results with the minimum expenditure of 
energy. 

It is quite true that the man who recognizes a sensation as a sen- 
sation, with all that that implies, is not performing the relatively 
simple operation of being conscious of that sensational content, ab- 
stracted from all else. He is really relating this content to the sys- 
tem of his experiences in rather a complicated way. But men perform 
such operations long before they have heard of psychology, and in 
building up the system of relatively exact knowledge which we 
call a special science, it is not necessary to begin at the very begin- 
ning. We may presuppose a certain amount of knowledge on the 
part of tkose to whom we speak and for whom we write. If every 
science had to justify all its assumptions before it proceeded with 
its special investigations, scientific treatises would have to be 
provided with prolegomena containing a mass of introductory 
matter which most authors would scarcely be in a position to fur- 
nish, which most readers would not need, and which many even 
of those to whom the body of the book was sufficiently intelligible, 
could not understand at all. 

Hence the psychologist may legitimately begin talking at the 
very outset of an external world and of sensations. His words 
will not be unintelligible even to a beginner^ and a thorough 
analysis of the conceptions which he is using may be postponed to 
some more convenient season. If we deny the psychologist the 
right to proceed upon the assumption of an external world and 
of minds mirroring it, insisting that he must first criticise these 
conceptions, where, I ask, shall we draw the line between the work 
of the psychologist and that of the metaphysician ? If we refuse 
to draw any such line, and thus to recognize the latter as having 
a field of his own, we must choose between two alternatives : 
either we must leave a number of very interesting questions un- 
answered, or we must burden psychological treatises with meta- 
physical disquisitions which have no necessary connection with 
the matter of which it is their chief purpose to treat, and with 



30 The Content of Consciousness 

which it is certainly contrary to the more modern usage to burden 
them. 

To the second objection mentioned above as urged against the 
psychological position which cuts the mind off from a direct 
knowledge of things and shuts it up to the world of its own ideas, 
namely, the objection that the mind should not be regarded as 
thus isolated, but should be conceived as directly knowing, in the 
act of perception, both ideas and things — to this objection it is 
not difficult to find an answer. The psychological position is, as 
we have seen, self-contradictory ; but it has been indicated that 
the contradiction may be removed by a restatement which leaves 
unaffected any psychological truths which have been established 
by the accepted psychological methods of investigation. I shall 
try to show later how one may set about the removal of this con- 
tradiction, and thus prove that psychological truths really are 
truths, and are worthy of our acceptance. It will, I hope, become 
clear that the psychologist really describes the facts of our expe- 
rience, and that his statements, properly understood, are not con- 
tradicted by those facts. 

But such a justification of the psychologist cannot be found in 
the attempt to improve upon his position by distinguishing as he 
does between ideas and things, regarding ideas as, in a sense, 
representative of things, and some ideas as more or less like the 
things they represent, and then granting the mind a direct knowl- 
edge of the thing, as well as of its representative idea — placing 
idea and thing, so to speak, side by side before it. It is within 
the reach of every man to satisfy himself of the error of this posi- 
tion, for it is refuted by his simplest experiences. If consciousness 
testifies to anything clearly and unmistakably, it is to the fact that 
we do not, under normal circumstances, see things thus doubled. 
The inkstand in front of me I see. I see only one. It appears 
to be out in front of my body in real space. Is there also a copy 
of it somewhere else? perhaps, within my body? I perceive 
nothing of the sort. I have never perceived any kind of an ink- 
stand, whether original or representative, within my body. If I 
press upon the sides of my eyeballs in the manner before alluded 
to, I perceive two inkstands, and I can make both of these dance 
about. Are there now in my experience two originals and one 
image, or two images and one original ? I perceive nothing save 
tlie two inkstands, apparently of the same nature, which are both 



The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 31 

in motion. If it be insisted that there is but one real inkstand 
before me, and that that one remains at rest, I answer, that this 
fact, if assented to by me, must be assented to as a consequence of 
a process of reasoning, for it is certainly not given within my 
immediate experience. I simply do not see anything of the kind. 
It is only the philosopher, or the man whose mind has been per- 
verted by intercourse with such, that can so impose upon his 
senses as to seem to himself, when he gazes upon a material 
object in front of him, to be conscious both of a copy and of 
an original. 

This doctrine, moreover, if taken up seriously into psychology, 
must be productive of much perplexity and distress. It must para- 
lyze the ordinary activities of the psychologist much as an incur- 
sion of the barbarians paralyzed the wonted industries of a busy 
and peaceful community. The psychologist enters, for example, 
upon a laborious description of the way in which a mind, by putting 
together and arranging the messages reaching it through the 
senses, builds up a more and more complete and satisfactory repre- 
sentation of an external world of things. He discusses the various 
elements of which such a consciousness must consist, limits the 
knowledge of the mind concerned to the materials which have 
been furnished to it, and holds that if any one class of elements 
be lacking, the mind's knowledge of the world will be correspond- 
ingly defective. But here is a doctrine which grants the mind a 
direct knowledge of external things independently of the existence 
in it of such a representative image. Of what importance, then, 
is the image, and what does it matter whether it be defective or 
not ? The mind will know things just the same, whether it has 
ideas of things or lacks them, and the function of ideas in knowing 
is not apparent. Upon this supposition a mind could conceivably 
know the external world and comprehend its properties and its 
happenings without having any ideas at all. Surely the psycholo- 
gist must stand aghast at such a possibility. What has become of 
his doctrine of the senses, of the conveyance of nervous impulses 
to the brain, of the elaboration of the impressions received, of 
the gradual emergence of a knowledge of things ? And how, on 
such a basis, can the psychologist explain the possibility of being 
deceived about the natures of things ? How explain an hallucina- 
tion ? If, in perception, there were immediately present to the 
mind, in addition to the image, also the thing represented by the 



32 The Content of Consciousiiess 

image, no mistake as to the objective reality of the experience 
would be possible. 

The fact is that this doctrine simply cuts away the foundations 
of the science of psychology as it at present exists. This is not 
the direction in which we must look for a way of escape from 
the difficulty which seems to confront us when we occupy the 
psychological standpoint. For an indication of the right path 
I shall ask the reader to wait a little, and, in the meantime, I 
shall ask him to believe that the psychological standpoint is not 
without its justification, even if it cannot be regarded as final. 



CHAPTER III 
HOW THINGS ARE GIVEN IN CONSCIOUSNESS 

From what has already been said it should be plain that he 
who would subject the world of his experiences to reflective analy- 
sis must begin his labors with an examination of the world in 
which he seems to find himself — the world of common thought and 
common sense. In his attempt at critical reconstruction he must 
use the material at hand ; and he must employ words and phrases, 
in communicating his thought, which are the common property of 
the race, and which have been coined for the purpose of making 
distinctions recognized by men generally, and not those which may 
come to be marked by the more reflective. The metaphysician is 
a man, like other men, and may easily be misled into accepting as 
final, merely because he is accustomed to them, ways of thinking 
which sorely need revision ; and since he is compelled to take 
language as he finds it, and do his best with a decidedly imperfect 
instrument, he may easily be misunderstood when he is not really 
at fault. 

It is necessary for me to emphasize the last point, at this stage 
of my discussion, because I propose in this chapter to examine how 
things are given in consciousness. This expression may easily give 
rise to misconception. It may be taken to mean, and by the man 
who occupies the psychological standpoint it will most naturally 
be taken to mean, that I intend to describe certain impressions, 
made by an external world quite beyond consciousness, upon a 
particular mind. 

But the criticisms contained in the last chapter have, I hope, 
made it evident that we have no reason to believe that anything is 
literally " given " to consciousness in this way. If we really do 
find ourselves in an external world, and have any reason at all for 
admitting its existence, it must itself be " given in consciousness " 
in some sense of the words, and it only remains for us to discover 
in what sense. This inquiry I shall relegate to certain chapters 
D 33 



34 The Content of Consciousness 

farther on in this work. Meanwhile, I ask the reader to follow 
me in marking certain distinctions in our way of being conscious 
of things, which, if clearly grasped, will be of no small service 
in helping us to approach the task intelligently. 

It is of the utmost importance to recognize that what is *' given 
in consciousness " may be given in consciousness in very different 
ways. In the first place, there is the distinction between that of 
which we are conscious vaguely and indefinitely, and that of which 
we have a distinct and analytic consciousness. Of this distinction 
even the unscientific man cannot be wholly ignorant, and it has 
been discussed at great length by the psychologist. No one pre- 
tends to recognize singly all the elements that enter into that 
highly complex mass of sensations which gives information of the 
various parts of the body. The man who gazes upon a landscape, 
and enjoys both the beauty of the scene and the manifold associa- 
tions to which it gives rise, knows that he cannot enumerate off- 
hand all of the elements which enter into his mental state and 
attribute to each its relative importance. 

The stream of our conscious life does not consist as a whole of 
sharply distinguished parts, although certain portions of it from 
time to time stand out distinctly from the rest and are known in a 
much more satisfactory way than are the other parts. It is like a 
picture with a few clear figures which detach themselves more or 
less vividly from a dark and indefinite background ; a picture 
peculiar in the fact that the figures which thus reveal themselves 
clearly keep changing, growing brighter or fading away and giv- 
ing place to others ; a picture ever varying, yet retaining in its 
general outlines the character which it had before. The fluctua- 
tions in the clearness with which given elements stand out from 
the rest are to some extent dependent upon our own volition. By 
attending to this element or that we give it a greater prominence, 
and drag it, as it were, into the light. The vague feeling of bodily 
discomfort may lead a man to notice that the chair upon which he 
is sitting must be an unusually hard one, or that his foot luis been 
drawn up under him in a cramped and unnatural position. The 
traveller viewing the landscape may deliberately single out certain 
features as especially pleasing, or consciously dwell upon some 
other scene, recalled by this one, and recognize it as largely account- 
ing for the emotion which inspires him. Tlie importance of the 
part played in our conscious life by its dimly conscious or scmicon- 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 35 

scious elements most men are inclined, from a lack of reflection, 
to underestimate ; but the fact that there exist in consciousness the 
two kinds of elements, and also that elements are continually 
emerging from an unnoticed obscurity and taking, for a time, a 
position in the foreground of consciousness, where their character 
and their relations to other elements may be clearly discerned — 
these things are admitted by all. 

Reflection upon the foregoing makes it easy to assent to the 
statement that it is difficult to know Avhat the contents of con- 
sciousness really are. It seems at first sight absurd to maintain 
that a man does not know all that he is conscious of; and yet 
there is a sense of the words in which the statement is strictly 
true. The verb to know may be given more than one meaning. If 
we choose to take it in a very broad and loose sense, we may say 
that we undoubtedly know everything that exists in consciousness, 
however dimly it may exist. We are, of course, conscious of every- 
thing in consciousness — the statement is purely tautological — and 
we may, if we please, call this knowing it. But when we speak of 
knowing a thing, we ordinarily mean that we know it with some 
degree of clearness and definiteness. We mean that we can hold 
it up before the attention and scrutinize it, marking its peculiari- 
ties and distinguishing it from other things. 

The differences in the clearness with which things are known 
are not accurately determined by the unscientific, and the fact 
that there are such differences is apt to be overlooked. But when 
we have come to a recognition of the fact that, in great part, the 
contents of consciousness lie in obscurity, that the different ele- 
ments do not stand out from their background, and that they offer 
no little resistance to the attempt to bring them into the light, we 
can understand that the task of the psychologist is not an easy 
one. We cannot expect him to sit down and draw up without 
further ado an inventory of the elements in his conscious experi- 
ence. When he attempts to describe for us what he finds "given 
in consciousness," he is in no little danger of mixing truth with 
error, and he needs to be endowed both with caution and with dis- 
cernment. 

For example, the man who watches the diminishing speck 
which represents a vessel fading away on the horizon, reaches a 
point at w^hich he is uncertain whether he still sees the vessel or 
not. He does not experience a moment of clear vision, imme- 



36 TJte Content of Consciousness 

diately followed by one in which the object is clearly recognized 
as absent. He experiences a series of gradual changes in which 
certainty passes into uncertainty, definiteness into indefiniteness. 
He continues to look, thinks, at one moment that he still sees the 
thing, at the next moment that he does not, and at still the next 
believes that he sees it again. In a legitimate sense of the words, 
he does not know what is in his own mind — whether he is ex- 
periencing a sensation or whether he is not. 

Sensations maybe vivid and unmistakably present ; but they 
may, on the other hand, approach the border line at which they 
fade out altogether, and their existence may easily be overlooked. 
The man who is quite sure that a hand has been laid upon his 
shoulder, may be unable to decide whether he has or has not been 
touched by a feather. There is no class of experiences which may 
not occupy this dim region of consciousness. A man may be in 
doubt whether he is hungry. He may be in doubt whether he 
is pleased. He may seriously debate whether he is still angry ; 
and he may wonder whether he is still in love. Some experiences 
in consciousness, even when they are present as vividly as it is 
possible for them to be, remain curiously vague and elusive. We 
may be strongly moved, and yet realize that it is quite impossible 
for us to describe in detail our emotion, although we dimly feel 
it to be a voluminous and a complex thing. 

In the second place, it is important to recognize that it is one 
thing to be "given in consciousness " directly, and another thing 
to be " given in consciousness " indirectly and by means of a 
memory-image. In our endeavors to make a careful analysis of 
what is given in consciousness, we must hold this or that experi- 
ence in the focus of attention; and in a vast number of instances 
what is thus held in the focus of attention must be the memory- 
image of the experience it is desired to analyze, and not the ex- 
perience itself. 

The man, for example, who is in a towering passion is in no 
condition to analyze, or even to attempt to analyze, the content of 
his consciousness at the time. This he can do only when he has 
grown cool enough to reflect, and when he has grown cool enough 
to reflect he has, of course, nothing left to work upon but the 
memory of his rage. Upon the general trustworthiness of memory 
all science must rest, and yet it must be recognized that everything 
that presents itself as a true memory-image should not ipso facto 



How Tilings are Given in Consciousness 37 

be accepted as such. Here, as elsewhere, one experience must 
be corrected by another, and the truth must be arrived at as the 
result of a systematic investigation. Every thoughtful man is 
aware of the fact that, in the endeavor to recall a given scene, he 
can be even reasonably sure only of the more striking elements, 
which impressed him vividly at the time when he viewed it ; that 
he is in no small danger of misapprehending others ; and that he 
may easily introduce into the memory-image elements which were 
not present in any form in the original, and which may even be 
taken bodily from quite other scenes. 

Thus, if a man be required to draw the plan of a suite of rooms 
through which he has passed, and which he has inspected, it will 
usually be found that his sketch resembles in some respects what 
he has seen, but in others does not truly represent it. Doors and 
windows are not in their proper positions ; there are stretches of 
unbroken wall in the plan which were broken in the original, or 
vice versa ; the proportions of the several rooms are not correct. 
The man has not reproduced just what he has seen, and he has 
not reproduced anything which was in his imagination at the time 
of the inspection. Some elements in his representative image do 
not truly represent anything that was in his mind before. They 
are products of the creative imagination, not memories. 

And if there is this possibility of error in recalling mental ex- 
periences which belong to that province of our mental life the 
objects in which emerge more readily from obscurit}^ and stand 
out more clearly than those belonging to the rest, how great must 
be the danger of misrepresenting in memory other experiences, 
such as the complex emotions of anger or fear. If the elements 
in such experiences are to be distinguished from one another, they 
must be brought into the focus of attention individually, they 
must be held in the foreground of consciousness in some way. 
Yet such elements primarily occur in consciousness as an almost 
undistinguishable mass; we are not in the habit of picking them 
out as we do this or that tree in the landscape before us. We 
rather /ee? our anger than hnow it, and the exigencies of practical 
life do not compel us to pay attention to its elements as they do 
force us to notice the individual material objects that constitute 
a group. 

This brings me to a third, and a very important, consideration. 
It is clear that when we endeavor to attain to a clear, analytic 



38 The Content of Consciousness 

knowledge of the content of some experience that we have had, 
we are not merely trying to reproduce that experience in the 
memory with fidelity and accuracy. The accurate reproduction 
of a vague and confused state of consciousness can only be a vague 
and confused state of consciousness. We do not seek to gain a 
mere reproduction ; what we seek to gain is a representative which, 
although it must be a true representative, must nevertheless differ 
in important respects from the experience for which it stands. 
Reflective thought does not merely reproduce common thought ; 
it analyzes it, breaking up complexes into their elements, and 
making those elements stand out independently, with fictitious 
clearness. 

The plain man thinks in complexes, and gives himself little 
conscious effort to analyze them. He sees a man before him, and 
although he is quite able to distinguish, if asked to do so, between 
the visual experience which he actually has and other possible 
visual experiences of the same object, as also between all his visual 
experiences and his tactual, yet he does not, until he is led to do 
so by the psychologist, reflect upon and clearly realize the complex 
nature of this percept and of all others, or attempt to enumerate 
the elements which enter into such. He does not distinguish 
what is in the sense from what is in the imagination, and it is not 
necessary for him to do so. He can touch the man if he wants to, 
and it is nothing to him whether the tactual qualities of the 
thing he sees are what philosophers call " actual " or what they 
call "potential." He uses his percept as he uses his food. He 
leaves it to some one else to analyze it. 

So also he agrees to meet us at a certain place at a given time, 
and his thought is sufficiently definite to be useful. He can find 
the place at the time appointed, but he cannot tell exactly what 
he means either by space or time. It is quite possible to employ 
with a good deal of accuracy a given mental state, without having 
any such distinct consciousness of its component parts as to be 
able to enumerate them. We all know things and do things with- 
out, as we express it, knowing how we know them and do them. 

But it is evident that even in common thought there is always 
going on an analytic procedure of a certain kind, and determined 
by practical needs. It would be quite impossible for a man to 
compare two material things and discover that they are in some 
respects similar and in some dissimilar, were it not possible for 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 39 

him to distinguish, in at least a vague way, between the several 
aspects or elements of the things in question. When a man looks 
at two trees and sees that they are of equal height but contrasted 
in color, he has distinguished with some clearness between the 
elements of form and color. Could he not do this, he might dimly 
recognize two trees as alike or as unlike, but he could not point 
out the elements which determine the similarity or the dissimilar- 
ity. Nor is it possible to comprehend how any man can compre- 
hend the thought contained in a page of any ordinary book unless 
we recognize that words can mean something to him without 
standing for individual objects, as we usually understand that 
term. The elements of consciousness for which they stand may 
be something too simple and fragmentary to constitute pictures, to 
form what have been so happily termed the " substantive " parts 
of consciousness; but these elements must obtain some sort of 
individual recognition, however fleeting and, for reflective thought, 
unsatisfactory that recognition may be. 

When we say, therefore, that the plain man uses his mental 
complexes without analyzing them, the statement needs modifica- 
tion. He does not analyze them consciously and with a deliberate 
view to a clearer comprehension of the elements which compose 
them, but he does analyze them instinctively and automatically, 
impelled by practical needs. Those things which come into the 
foreground of his consciousness and occupy his attention, are not 
whole objects, but rather aspects and elements of objects — just 
what reflection strives to obtain a clear view of. The man who 
scrutinizes a newly purchased desk runs his eye over every part of 
it ; he marks its length, its breadth, its color ; he finds it too high 
or too low, or remarks with satisfaction that he can write on it 
with comfort. These aspects of it occupy his mind successively, 
and not simultaneously. 

There is, however, a very important difference between such an 
analysis of mental complexes and a distinguishing of their separate 
elements as unavoidably takes place in all thinking, and the delib- 
erate analysis of reflective thought. In the former, although cer- 
tain elements do enter the foreground of consciousness, and receive, 
for a moment, something like individual attention, yet their prom- 
inence is but momentary, it is means and not end, and the mind 
passes on to something else without attempting to determine 
clearly what has taken place. The elements upon which attention 



40 The Content of Consciousness 

is fixed do not occupy the mttid to the exclusion of others ; they 
merely enjoy a relatively greater prominence. It is not possible 
either to see or to imagine the length of a table quite by itself. 
What one sees or imagines is something much more complex, and 
the fixing of attention upon the element of length does not banish 
the others, but merely throws momentarily an added ray of light 
upon this one. With our best efforts we cannot hold it perma- 
nently before the mind in this way, nor can we attain to such a 
clear consciousness of it as we seem to obtain of certain groups of 
elements taken as groups. We may thus fail to recognize what 
has actually taken place, and may even deny that the mind has in 
any way singled out separate elements and made them the object 
of special attention. It is easy to see, in following the nominalistic 
utterances of such writers as Berkeley and Hume, that it was this 
impossibility of holding before the mind as clear images the ele- 
ments singled out in the rapid analysis which takes place in all 
comparison of objects, that led them to deny the possibility of 
abstraction in any form whatever. The mind does not rest in 
abstractions, but rather in a somewhat diffused consciousness of 
groups of elements, and it finds it as difficult to describe the path of 
its rapid flight from group to group, as does the man who has tied 
his shoes to describe the motions that he has made during that 
operation. 

But reflection upon our mental processes makes it evident that 
mental elements quite incapable by themselves of forming pictures 
are singled out by the attention and become determinative of men- 
tal constructions of many sorts. Not only is it clear that this 
must be so, if objects and aspects of objects are to be compared 
with each other, as they certainly are compared with each other, 
and if the structure of a language is to be comprehensible ; but we 
find in a less obscure field of our experience a similar procedure 
which makes it not difficult to comprehend what must take place 
in such cases as are under discussion. 

It is recognized by every one that all the objects in conscious- 
ness do not stand out with equal vividness ; and though there may 
be a dispute as to what is actually in my mind when I fix attention 
upon the length or the color of the pen which I hold in my hand, 
no one will dispute that the pen as a whole, so long as it is an 
ol)ject of attention, is singled out from the other contents of con- 
sciousness and stands forth with a certain prominence. Tlie fnot 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 41 

that there is a diiference between a clear and a vague conscious- 
ness of things, the fact that there may be various degrees of 
clearness, and the fact that all those things which constitute the 
consciousness of a single moment are not perceived with equal 
clearness, are generally admitted. But if we can thus distinguish 
between the objects of consciousness, singling out some from others 
and bringing them into the focus of attention, is it not easily com- 
prehensible that the mind, by an analogous procedure, should single 
out certain elements of these objects from other elements and 
recognize their presence individually in a somewhat similar way ? 
That these elements cannot singly be held before the mind as pic- 
tures in no way invalidates the argument. 

The man who reasons thus may next have recourse to direct 
introspection. When he looks at his pen and distinguishes it 
from other things, he is conscious that he singles it out and makes 
it stand forth from its background in an individual way. And 
when he fixes attention upon the length of the pen, abstracting for 
the time being from its other aspects, he must feel that something 
analogous is taking place. When attention is diffused over the 
pen as a whole (a somewhat loose expression, but expressive of a 
truth), the background upon which it is seen does not disappear 
from consciousness. It simply lies in a comparative obscurity. 
And when attention is fixed upon the length of the pen, the other 
elements which go to constitute the object do not disappear from 
consciousness ; they only suffer a partial eclipse, they withdraw 
momentarily into the shade. The two cases are not wholly dis- 
similar, the difference is rather one of degree than of kind ; and 
a careful attention to what actually takes place during the con- 
centration of attention upon one aspect of an object, accompanied 
by an effort not to be misled by a preconceived notion derived from 
the nominalistic philosophers, or by a false expectation of being 
able to turn a single element, seized in a fleeting glance, into a 
relatively permanent image, will reveal that single elements of 
consciousness (I use the phrase somewhat loosely) can be made to 
stand out for a moment from those accompanying them, and may 
be at least sufficiently recognized to be named and used in later 
reasonings. 

It is the part of reflective thought to seek to determine such 
elements with some degree of accuracy, to fix them by the use of a 
symbol, and to obtain as exact a knowledge as may be of the inti- 



42 The Content of Consciousness 

mate structure of those mental complexes which we all use, but 
which we do not all analyze, except in the rudimentary and semi- 
conscious way indicated above. To common thought such com- 
plexes present themselves usually as units ; the fact that they are 
really analyzed in a vague and inadequate way, even in common 
thought, is apt to be overlooked. The procedure of reflective 
thought in separating them into their component parts appears to 
be unnatural, a juggling with mere words. And in a sense, such 
a procedure is unnatural. It is dealing with things as man in his 
primitive simplicity, or even as man endowed with merely scien- 
tific culture, does not deal with them. It is eating the forbidden 
fruit, and results in expulsion from the unreflective paradise in 
which every man passes his youth, and in which most men bring 
to an end their declining years. 

Thus reflection attempts to obtain a clear and detailed knowl- 
edge of the contents of consciousness, to resolve complexes into 
their constituent parts, and to recognize these parts as it is impos- 
sible for common thought to recognize them. The task is suffi- 
ciently difficult, and it is evidently quite possible that, in the 
endeavor to represent to one's self clearly the actual content of this 
or that experience, one may fall into serious error. The experi- 
ence in question is not reproduced ; it is represented by a proxy, 
and it may be misrepresented. In approaching such a reflective 
analysis of experience there are certain things upon which it is 
worth while to lay emphasis at the outset. 

For one thing, it should be recognized that, just because of the 
difference that obtains between common thought and reflection, 
the plain man cannot be regarded as a satisfactory witness touch- 
ing the things which are to be found in his own experience, when 
it is desired to obtain such a knowledge of these things as common 
thought does not usually furnish. 

It has been pointed out that a man may agree to meet us at a 
given place at a given time, and may keep his appointment, without 
knowing at all clearly what he means by space and time. He has 
no such knowledge of these as the reflective man wishes to obtain. 
When questioned he often gives very silly answers ; and he may 
make statements which find absolutely no justification in the expe- 
riences which he has had and which he is endeavoring more 
narrowly to determine. Scientific progress is not attained by shov- 
elling together opinions and counting heads, and it requires some 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 43 

sagacity to know what sort of testimony one may accept in 
establishing facts of a particular kind. It would not be well to 
accept the undivided vote of the continent of Africa as evidence 
of error on the part of a handful of European mathematicians. 

Nor can reflective thought accept without criticism, as giving 
a satisfactory account of the elements in human experience, that 
crystallization of common thought which we call language. The 
latter reflects the kind of thought which it was developed to express, 
and however well adapted to its purpose it may be, nay, just 
because it is well adapted to its purpose, it has the limitations which 
we might justly expect to find in it. It is sufficiently common to 
appeal both in psychology and in philosophy to the opinion of the 
plain man or to the common use of certain words, but the appeal 
must, in very many instances, be as senseless as the reference of a 
complicated technical question to the decision of a petit jury. If 
it is a question of something that lies within the province of reflec- 
tive thought, the man who does not reflect will probably be right 
only by accident. It goes without saying that both the opinion of 
the vulgar and the thought revealed in the structure of a language 
furnish most valuable material for reflective thought to work 
upon. Men may have experiences even if they cannot analyze 
them, and their inadequate descriptions of those experiences may 
yield to others some indication of their true nature. The popular 
vote is not valueless ; it is simply material for investigation. 

Again, we must not be surprised if we discover to be composite 
and analyzable some things in consciousness that common thought 
is inclined to regard as ultimate and simple. 

It is natural to suppose that experiences which the instinctive 
and imperfect analysis of the unreflective does not show to be com- 
plex, may, when subjected to a more careful and thoroughgoing 
analysis, turn out to be highly complex. For the purposes of 
common life it may be unnecessary to distinguish with any degree 
of clearness between the elements which enter into these ; and, 
as we have seen, such analysis as is found in common thought 
has its limits determined by practical ends. Hence, it is unwise to 
assume a given experience to be unanalyzable just because it presents 
itself at first glance under this aspect, or because men generally 
are in the habit of so regarding it. Any experience should be 
regarded as really simple only at the end of a very careful investi- 
gation, and after the application of every direct and indirect method 



44 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

known to reflection in the effort to resolve it into something more 
simple. Even then, the conclusion should be held tentatively, and 
there should be a readiness to change one's opinion if new evidence 
is forthcoming. 

Furthermore, we should in some cases be content to arrive at our 
conclusions as the result of a process of deductive reasoning, and 
should not insist upon evidence of a kind which, under the circum- 
stances, we have no right to expect to obtain. This point has been 
touched upon a little above, where I have pointed out that con- 
sciousness-elements, incapable by themselves of forming pictures in 
the sense or in the imagination, may yet be singled out by the 
attention and become determinative of various sorts of mental con- 
structions. I can best illustrate my position by quoting from 
David Hume, that arch-enemy of all abstraction, a passage marked 
by his characteristic lucidity, which, however, only serves to reveal 
the more clearly the erroneous nature of his reasoning. He writes : 

" Thus, when a globe of white marble is presented, we receive 
only the impression of a white color disposed in a certain form, nor 
are we able to separate and distinguish the color from the form. 
But observing afterwards a globe of black marble and a cube of 
white, and comparing them with our former object, we find two 
separate resemblances, in what formerly seemed, and really is, 
perfectly inseparable. After a little more practice of this kind, we 
begin to distinguish the figure from the color by a distinction of 
reason; that is, we consider the figure and color together, since 
they are, in effect, the same and undistinguishable ; but still view 
them in different aspects, according to the resemblances of which 
they are susceptible. When we would consider only the figure of 
the globe of white marble, we form in reality an idea both of the 
figure and color, but tacitly carry our eye to its resemblance with 
the globe of black marble : and in the same manner, when we would 
consider its color only, we turn our view to its resemblance with 
the cube of white marble. By this means we accompany our ideas 
with a kind of reflection, of which custom renders us, in a great 
measure, insensible. A person who desires us to consider the 
figure of a globe of white marble without thinking on its color, 
desires an impossibility ; but his meaning is, that we should con- 
sider the color and figure togetlier, but still keep in our eye the 
resemblance to the globe of black marble, or that to any other 
globe of wliatever color or substance."^ 

1 " Treatise of Iluinan Nature," Book I, Part I, § 7. 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 45 

But it is very evident, as has been pointed out, that such a 
comparison of objects would be impossible were they not analyzed 
into their elements, dimly and momentarily perhaps, but still with 
sufficient clearness to make it possible to recognize these elements as 
entering singly into certain combinations. If the figure and the color 
of the globe of white marble really remained to my mind " the same 
and undistinguishable," it is inconceivable that I should be able, in 
comparing this object with another, to assert that it was similar to 
it in one respect and dissimilar in another. What can the phrases 
"in one respect" and "in another" possibly mean when we are 
dealing with what is strictly " the same and undistinguishable " ? 
If form and color are really undistinguishable, then any object 
which resembles another in form resembles it in color too, for the 
two words mean the same thing, if, indeed, they have any meaning. 

Hume has recognized as existing only those things which exist 
in consciousness as pictures, which do not merely stand out for 
a fleeting moment, but retain their position of prominence long 
enough to force upon the unreflective a recognition of their exist- 
ence. And since single aspects of the complex experience he is 
discussing cannot be made to stand out in this way, he refuses to 
recognize their existence at all. I have indicated above that one 
who has, by reasoning, arrived at the conclusion that such expe- 
riences as Hume assumes to be simple must be complex, and that 
single aspects of them must receive some sort of individual recog- 
nition, may in some instances verify his conclusion by having 
recourse to introspection. He may convince himself that in com- 
paring the marble objects he is really conscious of form as he is not 
of color, at the one moment, and conscious of color as he is not of 
form, at the next. But the utterances of consciousness, thus 
directly appealed to, are not so clear and unambiguous that they 
may not be misunderstood ; and, in certain instances, where we are 
dealing with what is highly abstract, it may be impossible to have 
recourse to introspection at all. Introspection may, thus, support 
the general conclusions arrived at by processes of deductive reason- 
ing, and it may serve to show that our method is a correct one ; 
but it cannot be expected to speak with as clear a voice as Hume 
insisted upon hearing. We cannot be analytically conscious of the 
many resemblances and relations of which a perceived object is 
susceptible, as vividly as we are conscious of the complex out of 
which they are successively singled. But it is quite impossible to 



46 IVie Content of Consciousness 

explain the phenomena of our mental life unless the existence of 
these, its more evanescent aspects, be recognized. 

The temptation to overlook the truth here insisted upon is by no 
means so great to-day as it was at an earlier time. The investiga- 
tions of modern psychology have made it very evident that the 
contents of consciousness are perceived with varying degrees of 
clearness ; and have also revealed that what has been called the 
threshold of consciousness is not a line, but a strip of territory, a 
debatable land peopled by shades which have a real though a 
shadowy being. For example, the subjects who, in Professor 
Cattell's experiments on the perception of small differences, were 
given the task of judging which of two lights, exhibited at a brief 
interval, was the brighter, could usually distinguish the difference 
with a good deal of clearness when it really was a considerable 
one, and with less clearness when it w^as smaller. But it was 
found that even where the subject felt that he was making a 
decision at a venture, and doubted whether he had anything at all 
to go upon, he was right a sufficient number of times to reveal that 
his decisions were not the result of pure chance.^ He appeared to 
be determined by a sense of difference that had sunk below the 
level of clear consciousness, but had not disappeared from con- 
sciousness altogether; a sense of difference which still retained 
sufficient influence to bring about a correct decision in a certain 
proportion of cases. Of course it would be rash to conclude from 
this that every difference, however minute, in the external stimuli, 
must be the occasion of a parallel difference in the corresponding 
sensations. There may be physical differences to which there are 
no corresponding differences in physiological function and psychical 
reaction. The limits of such systems still lie pretty much in the 
dark. But we have, at least, warrant for assuming that the limits 
of such systems lie beyond the point at which one ceases to have a 
clear and unmistakable consciousness of differences in sensation. 

A good illustration of the method of arriving by deductive 
reasoning at a knowledge of the existence of mental elements 
which do not present themselves in a clear light to the eye of 
direct introspection is furnished by an investigation into the 
nature of similarity or likeness. That in some instances, at least, 
we mean by similarity nothing more nor less than partial identity 

1 " On the Perception of Small Differences," Philadelphia, 1892, pp. 142-145; see 
also pp. 124-127. 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 47 

appears sufficiently evident. When we look at two buildings and 
recognize that they are constructed in the same architectural style, 
but differ from each other more or less in the manner of their 
ornamentation, we are evidently analyzing the buildings into their 
component elements and recognizing that certain of these elements 
are, in the two cases, the same and certain are different. If the 
differences are unimportant in comparison with the identical 
elements, we declare the buildings to be very much alike, but if 
the contrary is the case, we declare them to be but little alike. 
And we recognize two chairs to be similar when both are provided 
with rockers, even though the one may be constructed of wood and 
the other of cane. The man who has a forehead and a nose like 
Napoleon may have a very feeble chin, and it is easy for us to 
indicate in such a case wherein the two men resemble each other 
and wherein they do not. We at once recognize the complexes 
we are comparing to be complexes, and we separate them by 
analysis into their component parts, distinguishing clearly between 
those which are identical and those which are different. 

Even where it is not very clearly recognized that the objects to 
be compared are complexes, the fact may be virtually recognized, 
the elements may be separately named, and the points of identity 
and diversity may be pointed out in detail. Such was the case in 
Hume's illustration of the marble globes and the marble cube. 
Color and form were distinguished from each other, and it was 
seen that there might be an identity in the one element and a 
diversity in the other. The critic who reads Hume's discussion 
can see that he treated his globes and his cube just as he would 
have treated a building, a chair, or a human face, and that his 
conclusions arise from the fact that he was not clearly conscious of 
his own mode of procedure. There can be no legitimate dispute 
now as to what took place in his mind. 

But it is possible to cite instances of a more doubtful nature. 
For example, it may be questioned, and is questioned by some, 
whether we class together different colors, such as red and blue, 
because, together with the differences which distinguish them, 
they also contain identical elements, elements not to be found in 
such sensations as those of sound or taste ; or whether we treat 
them in this way merely because they happen to be sensations 
referred to the same bodily organ. 

This question seems to find a sufficient answer in the fact that 



48 The Content of Consciousness 

within the province of any one sense we recognize minor classes, 
putting together and distinguishing from each other various kinds 
of blues and various kinds of reds. These minor classes cannot 
find their explanation in the grouping of wholly different sensa- 
tions through a common relation to a single sense-organ, nor can 
they find it in a reference to some one physical cause. They were 
made before anything was known about the luminiferous ether and 
the number of its vibrations per second. If an explanation is to 
be found for them at all, it must be found, as it seems, in the 
nature of the sensations themselves. And unless we take refuge 
in the assumption that it is an ultimate fact, to be accepted, not 
explained, that we compare and find similar but not wholly iden- 
tical various sensations which are not complex, but simple, and 
cannot present different elements of identity and difference, we 
must assume that our mode of procedure is similar to that in the 
cases described above, and that the obscurity of the question 
simply arises from the fact that we have passed into a region where 
all things are obscure, the misty region between clear consciousness 
and no consciousness at all. 

The assumption that we have arrived at what is ultimate and 
inexplicable is either one made provisionally for convenience in 
certain fields of psychological work, or it is the asylum of igno- 
rance — the refuge to which a man betakes himself when he would 
rather have almost any settled opinion than no opinion at all. 
Certainly it is not justified in the face of the fact, that when we 
are investigating cases of resemblance in a region in which the 
objects in consciousness present themselves with some degree of 
clearness, we find resemblance to consist in partial identity, and 
of the added fact that many of the elements of our conscious life 
lurk in the shade, and refuse to reveal themselves so distinctly 
that they can be told off one by one without danger of error. 
Analogy points to the conclusion that the same explanation may 
serve here which showed itself to be the true one in other instances. 

But what shall we say of the choice of the one word " sweet- 
ness " to describe things so diverse as the taste of sugar and the 
sound of a human voice ; or of the word " brilliance " to character- 
ize experiences so different as the light of a lamp and a flight of 
eloquence ? Is there any element of identity by means of which 
such experiences are grasped and classified? 

Of course, this use of language is not arbitrary ; there is 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 49 

felt to be a certain appropriateness in such expressions as " a sweet 
voice," " a smooth voice," " a brilliant speech," " an inflated 
style," etc. We feel that, in any given instance, a particular 
expression is the suitable one, and cannot be replaced by a dif- 
ferent one without detriment to the thought. There must be 
something, either in the experiences themselves, or in the relation 
which they bear to other things, to justify such a selection. In 
the instance of the colors there seems good reason to believe that 
the bond between them lies in an identical element in the expe- 
riences themselves ; at least, there is no good reason to believe 
that this is not the case. But, in the other instances referred to, 
the more reasonable explanation may be that the two experiences 
between which we remark an analogy stand in a common relation 
to something else, and that it is this common relation that we 
mark by the use of the expression employed in description. For 
example, even if we conclude that a sweet taste and a sweet voice 
have no common element, a conclusion which we should not 
draw hastily, we may have reason to believe that both give rise 
to emotional states which contain such an element, and we may 
discover the analogy, which we recognize, to be an instance of 
partial identity after all — of partial identity, so to speak, at one 
remove. It is quite clear that things may resemble each other, 
not merely in what they are in themselves, but also in their relations 
to other things. Two trees, in themselves not unlike each other, 
may also be alike in the fact that they are equally distant from a 
third tree. If this last point of similarity be the important one 
for the purposes of any special bit of reasoning, it may be the one 
to be singled out and held before the attention, and other points 
of resemblance may be allowed to pass unnoticed. 

This analysis of the nature of similarity not only furnishes a 
good illustration of the method of arriving, by deductive reasoning, 
at a knowledge of the existence in consciousness of elements 
which do not reveal themselves clearly and unmistakably to 
direct introspection, but it serves to bring into relief the true 
nature of thinking by the aid of a representative or symbol. 

The distinction between what is " given in consciousness " 
intuitively and what is given in consciousness only by means of 
the symbol has long been recognized, and it is one of which no 
thoughtful mind can be wholly ignorant. It is simply the dis- 
tinction between the thing itself and the representative of it 



60 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

which we choose to employ or may be compelled to employ in 
dealing with it. When I look at a single pebble lying before me 
in the road, I am clearly conscious of it as one. If, however, 
I collect fifty such, and spread them out before me, I cannot, in 
looking at them, be conscious of the whole fifty, as I was con- 
scious of the one. The number of elements that can stand out 
clearly in consciousness at any one time is limited, and that 
number is here exceeded. It is true that, if the whole number 
fall well within my field of vision, I may, for aught I know to 
the contrary, be dimly conscious of the whole fifty at once. 
This does not mean that I am conscious of them as fifty — as 
more than forty-nine and as less than fifty-one. To be conscious 
of things in this way is not to be dimly conscious of them. 
When I say I may be dimly conscious of them all at once, I mean 
only that there may be dimly present in consciousness all those 
distinctions which, could they be more clearly marked, would be 
recognized as constituting this group a group of fifty individuals. 
But since it is out of the question to substitute for this dim 
experience a clear consciousness of fifty individuals, we are 
forced to represent it by a symbol, and treat the symbol as though 
it were the thing itself. 

The symbol may, of course, represent any aspect of the thing 
with which we have to deal ; in the instance given, it represents 
their quantity or number. A system of symbols may become ex- 
tremely complicated, and single symbols, or whole groups of them, 
may represent, not merely a collection of things which can only 
be dimly perceived in a consciousness at any one time, but also 
what cannot be directly present in any consciousness, even dimly. 
In other words, much of our knowledge must ever remain sym- 
bolic. It is hardly necessary to point out that a system of 
symbols cannot be a purely arbitrary creation. Symbols must 
truly represent things, or some aspect of things, and the sole 
foundation upon which they rest, the sole source from which they 
obtain their meaning and worth, is the intuitive knowledge 
which furnishes us with a direct experience of things. 

It is of no little importance to recognize what constitutes the 
symbol as such. We frequently speak of the marks which the 
mathematician makes upon his paper as symbols, but a little 
reflection reveals that the figures themselves are merely the 
"Trager," the arbitrary carriers, of the true symbol, the mathe- 



How Things are Given in Consciousness 51 

matical relation which it is desired to express. They are the 
hooks upon which it is convenient to hang thoughts, the handles 
by which the thoughts may be grasped, not the thoughts them- 
selves. They suggest thoughts, and do not, properly speaking, 
represent them at all. Their whole meaning lies outside of 
themselves. 

In a broad and loose sense of the word they may be called 
symbols ; and it is certainly possible, by their aid, to deal with 
complicated experiences in a way in which it would be impossible 
to deal with them directly ; but when one deals merely with 
figures, and performs mechanically various operations which one 
has learned to perform without insight into their significance, 
one can only by way of courtesy be said to be occupied with 
mathematical reasonings. The figure 6 may suggest six objects, 
but it does not represent them as a short line may represent a 
long one. In the latter case some of the elements of the line 
represented are actually present in the representative — for ex- 
ample, its divisibility into parts, or the nature of its curve. The 
mind may fix attention upon these points of similarity, and 
neglecting the differences, may observe mathematical relations 
with a vivid sense of the precise nature of the mental operations 
which it is performing. It may then carry its results over to 
the longer line with a feeling of confidence that it will not fall 
into error, since its representative truly represents the longer line 
it is desired to determine, in the only qualities which enter into 
the question. It is really dealing, not with a short line and a 
long one, but with certain aspects common to both ; and in using 
the representative as it does, it simply employs a convenient 
device for holding those aspects steadily and clearly before the 
mind. The short line does not as a whole represent the longer 
one : it represents it only in its identical elements, and the mis- 
taken belief that it represents it also in others can only result 
in confusion and in error. A line can conveniently represent 
a line because it is like it ; it cannot represent a mathematical 
point in the same way, because the two do not thus resemble each 
other. 

A careful examination of our knowledge by means of a repre- 
sentative or symbol, in the many instances in which our mental 
operations do not lie too much in the shade to permit of our 
scrutinizing them with some degree of clearness, reveals the fact 



52 lite Content of Consciousness 

that we are really dealing, either with aspects of things, brought 
before the mind, for convenience, not singly, but combined with 
elements not directly concerned in our reasonings ; or with con- 
ventional signs of such aspects of things, such as the figures used 
in arithmetic. And it seems reasonable to hold, at least until 
good reason be adduced for abandoning the assumption, that the 
same explanation may be given of those instances of representative 
knowledge which do not easily lend themselves to analysis. 

Moreover, when one has firmly grasped the significance of the 
symbol, one is in a position to form some estimate of the possible 
limits of symbolic knowledge. It is quite possible for a man to 
mistake the arbitrary signs of thoughts for thoughts, and to sup- 
pose that, when he has made an intricate combination of such 
signs, he is necessarily dealing with an intricate thought. Yet he 
may be doing so or he may not — it is necessary to bear in mind 
that one may so put together the conventional signs of thoughts 
that the combination does not in itself represent a thought of any 
sort. It does not follow that such a combination may not be of 
service for certain purposes, that it may not, at least, be a useful 
record of a series of operations which have been performed or 
which may be performed. That the whole group of signs, taken 
as a group, cannot truly symbolize any conceivable experience, 
does not prove that the combination is of no value, and may not 
have a legitimate place in a science. But it is well to remember 
that it is easy to mistake the significance of signs when they are 
used in an abstract science. That this is a constant danger, no 
one knows better than the thoughtful mathematician, and he will 
be the first to admit that all mathematicians are not thoughtful. 

A clear comprehension of the nature of symbolic or representa- 
tive knowledge is of the utmost importance to the metaphysician. 
Those who are inclined to hold to the existence of an external 
world quite different from the world of our experience usually 
admit that we can never know these external things directly, but 
hold, as we have seen, that we may know them indirectly through 
their representative images. But it is as clear as day tliat we can 
onlV" know through a representative those things which this 
representative can truly represent, that is to say, those things 
which contain identical elements with it, and in so far as they 
contain identical elements with it. A representative can never 
stand for something else in so far as that other thing differs from it. 



Holo Things are Given in Consciousness 53 

A sound, as sound, cannot represent a color as color, nor can it 
make in any way comprehensible to a man who has never seen 
a color, what the nature of the latter may be. Thus if we know 
immediately only elements in consciousness, it is inconceivable 
that we should, by means of these, represent to ourselves elements 
of a different kind in so far as they are different. The necessary 
limitations to the knowledge of the prisoner in the cell described 
in the preceding chapter are seen to be not unfairly set forth, 
when one reflects upon the nature of representative knowledge. 
The metaphysician must^ then, cast about for a better doctrine 
than the one which thus misconceives the nature of symbolic 
knowledge. 

But when he has rejected the doctrine just criticised, shall the 
metaphysician maintain that the external world is given in con- 
sciousness immediately ? At the beginning of the present chapter 
it was indicated that we must assume it to be given in conscious- 
ness in some sense of those words. It is palpably absurd to 
maintain that the external world is intuitively present to any 
human consciousness in the immensity and overpowering wealth 
of detail that we seem justified in attributing to the external 
world. How, then, shall we conceive it to be given in con- 
sciousness? The problem does not seem incapable of a reason- 
able solution when one has come to a clear comprehension of the 
nature of symbolic knowledge, as I shall try to make plain in the 
appropriate place ; but it appears to be a hopeless problem to one 
who has not grasped this distinction. This last truth emerges 
with great distinctness when we examine the perplexities and 
inconsistencies into which men have fallen when they have 
endeavored to give an accurate account of the nature of space 
and time. 

I feel that it would hardly be fair to set forth, as I have done 
in this chapter, the method of arriving, by deductive reasonings, 
at an analytic knowledge of the elements in consciousness, with- 
out at the same time indicating some of the rather startling conse- 
quences to which it appears to lead one when applied with logical 
consistency and thoroughness. Few would shrink from the con- 
clusion suggested by an examination of Hume's illustration of the 
globes and the cube of marble, the conclusion, namely, that we do 
really distinguish between form and color, and in some way grasp 
each element separately. It is generally recognized that a percept 



54 The Content of Consciousness 

is a complex mental experience, and an attempt is made in modern 
handbooks of ])sychology to enumerate in detail its elements. But 
there are cases in which what appears to be the most reasonable 
conclusion, from a theoretical point of view at least, is of such a 
nature that even a trained psychologist may hesitate to give his 
assent to it. 

Such an instance is the following : in studying sensations the 
psychologist distinguishes in them certain aspects, such as their 
duration, extensity, intensity, and quality. Let us consider only 
two of these, and let us suppose a man to be conscious at a given 
moment of two apparently unextended points of color, the one 
red and the other blue. These the psychologist will recognize as 
differing in quality, since the colors are not identical ; but he may 
maintain that the intensity of the two color-sensations is the same. 
In other words, he recognizes the two sensations to be in the one 
respect identical, and in the other different, just as in Hume's 
illustration two globes were found to agree in form and not in 
color. 

But if it is reasonable to infer, from the fact that the one globe 
is perceived to resemble the other in one element and to be dis- 
similar from it in another — if it is reasonable to conclude from 
this that each of these experiences is complex, and that this com- 
plex is analyzed in the act of comparison, why is it not reasonable 
to carry over the same reasoning to the two experiences of color 
which we are discussing ? If two color-sensations really have the 
same intensity while they have not the same quality, it surely 
follows that intensity and quality are not identical, but are distinct 
elements, recognized as distinct, at least implicitly, by every one 
who distinguishes them from each other. Each of the sensations 
is, then, a complex thing, and not simple, and the successive acts 
of attention which mark at one time its intensity and at another 
its quality, are singling out its elements just as attention always 
singles out certain things in consciousness from certain others, and 
gives them a relatively greater prominence. But if such sensa- 
tions are really complex and may be thus separated in thought 
into their elements, is it not, at least theoretically^ possible that 
the one element might disappear from consciousness altogether, 
and the other remain undisturbed ? In other words, can we not 
conceive a state of consciousness which would be a consciousness 
of intensity alone, divorced from quality, or of quality divorced 



Holo Things are Given in Consciousness 55 

from intensity? It seems rather appalling to contemplate the 
possibility of a consciousness of color which has no intensity at 
all, or of a consciousness of intensity without anything to be 
intense, but it may be questioned whether we can legitimately 
arrive at any other conclusion. 

It will not do to say that we cannot imagine a color of no 
intensity at all, and hence the problem may be dismissed. Of 
course we cannot imagine it as we imagine colored surfaces with 
all the characteristics which usually mark them. But then we 
are also unable, when we look at a globe of marble, to separate 
the color-sensations pure and simple from all the other elements 
which a past experience of things has furnished us, and hold them 
up before the mind's eye by themselves. This does not prevent 
us from distinguishing between them and the rest of the elements 
constituting our percept, and even believing that in certain con- 
sciousnesses — those of infants at the outset of their mental life — 
they may present themselves in a more independent way. 

The question is, to be sure, one of theoretical rather than 
of practical interest, but it is worth while to discuss it, if only 
because it brings into relief the general method of attaining an 
analytic knowledge of the contents of consciousness, and empha- 
sizes some of the difficulties connected with it. That there are 
such difficulties should be frankly admitted, and it should as 
frankly be admitted that we are at present far from having as 
complete a knowledge of the contents of consciousness as it is 
desirable that we should attain. Were it easy to attain to such 
a knowledge, many disputes which have been carried on with 
energy through whole centuries, and which we have inherited from 
our predecessors, would have died away in a remote past. They 
still live because they have a reason for living. Our most dan- 
gerous error lies in supposing it to be easy to describe our own 
experience, in assuming that the panorama of our mental life 
unrolls itself before the introspective eye in a clear light, and that 
the objects which it pictures stand out in unmistakable detail. 
It is too often forgotten that it is one thing to have an experience, 
and quite another to reflect upon it. And until one has reflected 
upon one's experiences with some degree of success, one can only 
in a restricted sense of the word be said to have " had " them. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE ELEMENTS IN CONSCIOUSNESS 

The attempt to obtain a general view of the contents of con- 
sciousness at first results in a bewildering sense of the variety and 
complexity of the material which presents itself for examination. 
But attention soon reveals that there are certain broad distinctions 
which one may make, and which have been recognized more or 
less clearly for a long time past. 

In the first place, there is the distinction between what is given 
in the sense and what is reproduced in memory or imagination — 
a distinction marked by Hume by the use of the terms " impres- 
sions" and "ideas." 

In a given instance it may not be easy to decide offhand 
whether a certain experience is to be relegated to the one class 
or to the other; but in general the distinction is a sufficiently 
apparent one, and is recognized by the plain man and the scholar 
alike. Sense-experiences, or at least such of them as usually 
occupy the attention and stand out in our minds as representa- 
tives of their class, possess a vividness denied in most cases to 
"ideas." I cannot confuse the vivid experience of tlie pen which 
I see on the table before me with the shadowy and unsubstantial 
image of the pencil which I imagine to be lying beside it. The 
contrast is here very great, and it needs no system of tests to con- 
vince me that the two objects fall under different categories. It 
is true that sense-experiences do not always distinguish themselves 
so clearly from the images present in the imagination. These 
images may become very vivid and insistent, and sensations may 
be extremely vague and obscure. A series of experiments may 
be needed ])efore it is possible to decide that a certain experi- 
ence, which is not recognizable at first glance as belonging to the 
one class or to the other, at least behaves in such a way, stands in 
such a connection with other experiences, that its proper place 
may be assigned to it with confidence. If we are wise, we will 

56 



The Elements in Consciousness 57 

not assume that the sheeted ghost which presents itself to our 
startled eyes when we awake from slumber on the stroke of 
twelve, is a real phantom, a creature of the sense, merely because 
it is vividly perceived. We will ask it to present its credentials, 
prove its claim to respectability of character, and, in short, to con- 
duct itself as a real ghost, claiming a right to be admitted into the 
circle of real things, should conduct itself. If it fails to establish 
its claim, we will harden our hearts to its unsubstantial sighs, and 
banish it to the limbo of the things that are not what they seem. 

Fortunately, it is not always necessary to employ such indirect 
methods in distinguishing between sense-experiences and " ideas." 
In most instances the two classes fall apart of themselves. Were 
any man capable of confusing them at all times, his progress in a 
crowded street would be an eccentric one. We may assume that 
they may be distinguished directly by most meii with sufficient 
accuracy for the purposes of common life, although we must admit 
the possibility of error in individual cases, and must make a final 
appeal, when any dispute arises, to the methods of investigation 
described by the logician. The attribute of possessing a greater 
vividness is sufficient to mark out roughly the one class of expe- 
riences from the other. If there is any other difference in the 
experiences themselves, we must turn for information regarding 
it to the psychologist. 

Thus we find the phenomena of our mental life divided into 
two broad classes. It is generally admitted that one of these 
must be regarded as, in a sense, copied from the other. It is self- 
evident that the images in the memory cannot be original crea- 
tions, but can come into being only when there have been certain 
experiences in the sense ; and it has often been pointed out that 
there is no flight of the imagination which can carry it out of the 
region of the elements derived in the first instance from the senses. 
We may combine these elements in many ways, and we may build 
up complexes which, as complexes, are new ; but further than this 
it is impossible for us to go. No man who has never seen a color 
can imagine one, nor can he truly represent to himself any expe- 
rience into which the element of color enters. These truths are 
commonplaces of psychology, and it is unnecessary to dwell upon 
them at length. 

There is another broad distinction between elements in con- 
sciousness, upon which much emphasis has been laid for a few 



58 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

generations ptost. This is the distinction between /orm and matter^ 
between the arrangement of certain elemeutii in consciousness and 
those elements themselves. 

It is manifestly not a complete description of our experience 
to say that we find in it such and such sensations of sound, color, 
touch, pain, etc., and such and such reproductions of these in 
memory and imagination. These sensations and ''ideas" are 
arranged in divers ways, and stand in manifold relations to each 
other. These relations exist as truly as do the things which 
stand in relation, and we constantly recognize them in our rea- 
sonings in much the same way. 

For example, when we look at three blue spots so arranged 
that lines joining them with each other would form an equilatei-al 
triangle, and then look at three red spots similarly arranged, we 
recognize a sameness and a difference, just as we do when we 
compare a globe of white marble with a globe of black. We see 
that there is identity in the formal element in our experience and 
diversity in the material. And when we compare three blue 
spots arranged as above mentioned with three similar blue spots 
arranged in a row, we find the material element to be identical, 
and the formal to be diverse. In such a case there is no difficulty 
in distinguishing between the two elements, and in picking out 
the one from the other. We are evidently dealing with a com- 
plex and are analyzing it into its constituents, and the difficulty 
of holding relations separately before the attention, and obtaining 
a clear view of them, appears to be only an instance of the dif- 
ficulty which always confronts us when we attempt to grasp, in an 
analytic way, elements of the complexes which constitute our 
experience. 

The material elements in consciousness may either be present 
simultaneously, or they may be successive. In this distinction we 
have the two most general classes into which the ways of arrang- 
ing them may be divided. The former class it is convenient to 
subdivide further, for not all those material elements which 
appear in consciousness simultaneously stand to each other in 
what we call spacial relations. These latter form a special class, 
a form of coexistence of such importance that it is sometimes over- 
looked that there are coexistences of a different kind. Relations 
of succession are those classed together as temporal. 

It is important to bear in mind the fact that these ways of 



The Elements in Consciousness 59 

arranging material elements are actually found in our experience. 
It does not appear possible to reduce them to anything simpler, or 
to identify them with one another. Philosophers and psychologists 
have sometimes maintained that spacial relations are not actually 
given in consciousness, but are merely represented by non-spacial 
experiences, which in some way stand for really extended things 
without; and they have similarly maintained that we have no 
immediate consciousness of succession, on the ground that we can 
exist only in successive instants, that all that is in consciousness 
at any one instant must be simultaneous, and that any past in- 
stant, since it has vanished away and given place to its successor, 
can only be represented in the actual present by some proxy, in 
itself not a past experience, but capable in some inexplicable way 
of standing for one. Thus the images in the memory are, it is 
claimed, present experiences, but are recognized as symbolic of the 
past. 

It is a sufficient answer to such doctrines to recall to mind the 
nature of symbolic or representative knowledge in general. We 
have seen that things can represent each other only in so far as 
they have identical elements. If this be so, how is it possible for 
a consciousness, which contains no spacial arrangement of elements, 
to represent in any manner objects extended in space — to obtain 
the faintest inkling of what is meant by spacial extension ? It 
contains nothing which can stand for such; coexistent elements 
not spacially arranged cannot serve its purpose, for the one thing 
it is desired to represent is not present in them in any form what- 
ever. A small space may represent a large one, in so far as both 
are space ; but the man who seriously holds that nothing in con- 
sciousness is truly extended, that none of its elements stand in 
spacial relations, must either deny to us all knowledge of space 
whatever, or virtually maintain that sound as sound may represent 
color as color, or that taste as taste may represent straightness or 
triangularity as such. It is the old difficulty, the attempt to make 
something out of nothing ; and it is only the obscurity in which the 
action takes place that prevents the whole procedure from receiv- 
ing instant condemnation. 

So it is also in the case of time. If we have no immediate con- 
sciousness of succession, if our memory-images do not themselves 
belong to the past, even a very slightly remote past, but are present 
elements which merely rejpresent the past, where do we get that 



60 The Content of Consciousness 

idea of succession which we read into them, thus making them, not 
present images, but something more? In such a case, this some- 
thing more must be a mere negation ; there can be no positive con- 
tent to read into our symbol, for none such is furnished by our 
experience. 

Doubtless the reader will here start at the paradox to which our 
reasonings seem to point, namely, to the doctrine that the past is 
not really past and vanished, but remains in some sense present 
in the present moment. This paradox is many centuries old, and 
many have wagged their heads against it. I shall be compelled to 
enter into the question at length in a later chapter, and shall try to 
show that the difficulty is not an insurmountable one.^ But, for 
the present, it is enough to insist that a symbol deprived of its 
meaning is no true symbol, and that if we have no immediate knowl- 
edge of the lapse of time, we shall never gain a mediate knowledge 
of such by fitting together elements in which no element of succes- 
sion is contained. To declare the representation of the past by 
present images in the memory to be something ultimate and in- 
explicable, which one must simply accept, is not merely a refusal 
to seek further for the explanation of an accepted fact ; it is to 
furnish a false explanation ; it is to demand of a representative 
what it is clear that no representative is able to perform. 

When one has distinguished between the formal and the mate- 
rial elements in consciousness, it is important to remember that 
they are both elements in consciousness and should be treated in 
our reasonings in much the same way. Sometimes this caution is 
not heeded, and we not infrequently find the element of form 
handled in what can only be called a fantastic and irresponsible 
manner. It seems to be assumed that it is freed from the limita- 
tions which attach to the material element and make its manner of 
existence comprehensible. For treating it in this way there is no 
good warrant, and doing so only introduces needless confusion into 
our thought. 

An illustration will serve to make this clear. It was pointed 
out a little above, that, in comparing three blue spots so arranged 
that the lines joining them would make an equilateral triangle, 
with three red spots similarly arranged, we recognize a sameness 
and a difference, an identity in the formal element and a diversity 
in the material ; while in comparing the former with three blue 

1 Chapter XIII. 



The Elements in Consciousness 61 

spots arranged in a row, we recognize an identity in the material 
element and a diversity in the formal. But it should be remarked 
that the words " sameness " and " identity," as here used, cannot 
be taken as indicating identity in the strictest sense. 

Three spots of blue color in the one place are not strictly 
identical with three spots of blue color in another place ; they are 
merely like them. Even if they are so much like them that there 
is no possible way of distinguishing the two groups of spots from 
each other except by noticing that they are in different places, 
there still remains at least this difference. The one thincr, no 
matter what the nature of that thing may be, cannot at once exist 
in two different places. Nor can the one thing, strictly speaking, 
exist in two different times. We may, of course, apply the term 
" one thing " to a complex whose elements are in part successive, 
and we constantly do thus use it. But the sameness of such a 
thing is manifestly a very different one from that strict identity 
which excludes all diversity whatever, whether of time, place, or 
quality. In common speech we do not determine our thought 
with great accuracy, and we frequently speak of a color perceived 
in one place or at one time as identical with one perceived in an- 
other place or at another time, not stopping to think whether we 
are indicating a complete or a merely partial identity. But a little 
reflection shows us that we must have reference to the latter, and 
not the former. It is no more possible for two spots of color to be 
one, or the color of two distinct spots to be one (how hard it is to 
be clear when language is adapted to indefinite modes of thought I )? 
than it is for two cows or two horses to be one. In the latter case 
we are dealing with complex experiences, and in the former with 
elements of such, but temporal and spacial distinctions, which 
mark the difference, remain just the same. It is impossible that a 
thing should in any way be distinguished from itself, but it can be 
distinguished from other things. Where any diversity whatever 
can be remarked, we are not dealing with the one thing alone. 

It is difficult for some minds to see that, in making such state- 
ments, we are justified in taking the word "thing" in the broadest 
possible sense, in asserting that to be true of single qualities of 
things which is generally admitted to be true of things as com- 
monly understood. The reason for this lies in the fact that we do 
not usually find it necessary to distinguish between two occurrences 
of the same quality and mark that distinction by words. When 



62 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

one asserts that the color of one spot is identical with that of 
another, and maintains that it is strictly identical on the ground 
that qualities are not to be subjected to the local and temporal 
distinctions which mark individual things, he is simply fixing his 
attention upon color in the abstract, and failing to notice that color 
is not precisely the same as this or that occurrence of color, for 
the latter is a more complex experience — it is color with a differ- 
ence. He is recognizing the universal, but failing to distinguish 
it from the individuals "in" which it appears. It is manifestly 
an error to confound one individual with another, simply on the 
ground that they contain a common element, whether those indi- 
viduals be relatively complex experiences or relatively simple ones. 
" Color here " and " color there " are not one and the same experi- 
ence, and must not be confused. 

But even those who can see quite clearly that this is so, are 
not always capable of seeing that the same distinctions must be 
firmly held to in dealing with the formal element in consciousness. 
If I can recognize, in comparing two experiences, that they are 
identical in the material element and diverse in the formal, or 
diverse in the material and identical in the formal, I am manifestly 
capable of singling out the latter element from the former and 
talking about it. It is, of course, important that I should not talk 
about it incoherently, or deal with it in an arbitrary way. If I 
fail to recognize that the relations between these tliree spots of 
color are not strictly identical with the similar relations between 
three other spots, but are merely resembling, if I insist that the 
relations are truly identical, though the material elements are not, 
I show gratuitous and unjust discrimination, and I throw into hope- 
less confusion my ideas regarding the formal element in conscious- 
ness and its manner of existence. 

When I look at the three spots before my eyes I am conscious 
of both the elements we have been discussing, the sensations of 
color and their arrangement. If these three spots are these three 
spots and no others, surely the relations between them are these 
particular relations and no others. I do not distinguish the spots 
merely from other spots which differ from them in color, but also 
from those which resemble them in color but either existed at a 
different time or now exist in a different place. There is surely as 
good reason to distinguish these particular relations, existing at 
this time and place, not only from all relations of a different sort. 



The Elements in Consciousness 63 

but also from those like them which may have formerly existed or 
now exist elsewhere. It is not necessary for the purposes of com- 
mon life to mark such distinctions, and it is possible to explain 
psychologically the error of the man who fails to recognize them. 
But it is not easy to bring him to a sense of his error. One cannot 
show him that his reasons for making of a relation a monster capa- 
ble of existing in several places at the same time are insufficient. 
He has no reasons for taking such a position. He simply takes it. 
Possibly it might have some effect upon his mind to show him that 
all sorts of different objects may be identified with each other by 
just the same mode of procedure, by fixing attention upon the ele- 
ments of identity which they present, and overlooking all differ- 
ences, including such as are spacial and temporal ; by taking leave, 
in other words, of real things, having their definite place in the 
world-system, and taking refuge in abstractions. Of course, the 
man who does this has no right to place his abstractions in 
the real world. That world contains no "place" in general; it 
contains only definite places that must be occupied by individual 
things which are not abstractions. 

Thus, whether we are dealing with the material element in 
consciousness or with the formal, we must reason coherently and 
remain intelligible. A relation is not possessed of miraculous 
powers any more than a color or a sound. Relations which exist 
at different times or in different places are thus distinguished as 
different, however closely they may resemble each other. In short, 
the difference which we recognize between the elements of form 
and matter does not justify us in treating them in our reasonings 
in a different way. It may seem to the reader a gratuitous cruelty 
to inflict upon him so lengthy a discussion of what appears a 
simple and evident matter, but there has been so much mysti- 
fication connected with the formal element in consciousness that 
one cannot be too explicit. 

But if it is possible to fall into the error of treating the formal 
elements in consciousness as so different from the material that 
the manner of their existence becomes unintelligible, it is also 
possible to fall into the contrary error of confounding the two 
classes of elements with each other, and failing to recognize any 
ultimate difference between them. 

One may argue that when we look at two patches of color, and 
distinguish the spacial relation in which they stand to each other 



64 The Content of Consciousness 

from the colors themselves, we are not really separating, in thought, 
form from matter, for each patch is necessarily extended in space, 
and is itself a complex composed of both elements, the various 
parts of the patch standing in spacial relations to each other. If, 
it may be said, instead of considering the two patches, we take any 
two parts of the one patch, we will find again that the material 
element, which we are trying to single out, is not a purely 
material element, but contains also an element of form ; and since 
any patch of color whatever is infinitely divisible, it is hopeless to 
attempt, by repeating the operation, to arrive at an element wliich 
is material and nothing more ; we shall always find color and form 
combined, never one alone. From this it may be concluded that 
we have not really to do with two elements, for the material ele- 
ment we may recognize, at any stage of our progress, as consti- 
tuted^ or made what it is, by the formal element. 

In this bit of reasoning it is very easy to find flaws. I shall 
say nothing here of the assumption that every patch of color is 
infinitely divisible, for that can best be discussed in a later chapter 
on the nature of space ; but even assuming for the present that no 
objection can be made to this assumption, the argument may be 
seen to be an extremely loose one. In the first place, it admits 
that we distinguish between the two patches of color and the 
spacial relation between them. It is fair to ask whether this rela- 
tion is confounded with either of the patches or with both of them, 
or is supposed to contain any material element ? The relation is 
not a color, and is not supposed to be such by any one. In the 
second place, it is discovered that each of the patches of color is 
itself a complex, and consists of material elements which stand 
in relations to each other. Here again there is no confusion 
between the elements in relation and the relations themselves. 
No one thinks of the halves of a patch of color, whether that patch 
be large or small, as identical with the relation between those 
halves, or even as like it. So it is at each stage of our progress ; 
the things perceived are distinguished from the relations in which 
they stand, and they are always recognized as different from them. 
The fact that the things perceived are not simple elements, but 
complexes, has nothing whatever to do with the possibility of 
their being recognized as standing in certain relations to each 
other, and as being themselves distinct from those relations. By 
hypothesis, a further progress simply repeats the former experi- 



The Elements in Consciousness 65 

ences ; we must always be conscious of two elements, a formal and 
a material ; we cannot arrive, by any possibility, at what is simple 
and ultimate, but must ever deal with complexes. And from this 
there is sometimes drawn the surprising conclusion that we do not 
really have to do with two elements. By what art this conclusion 
may be abstracted from such premises it is impossible to conceive. 
Perhaps the difficulty arises partly from the use of such ambiguous 
forms of expression as that qualities are " constituted by " rela- 
tions,^ If we take this as meaning "made up of," we certainly 
have no warrant in any of the above-described experiences for 
assuming that a patch of color is constituted by relations. If we 
take it as meaning " partly made up of," we have no warrant 
for declaring that the distinction between relations and material 
elements is not an ultimate one, for our patch of color may also 
be constituted by elements of a different sort. 

Another form of the argument to prove that the distinction 
between the formal and the material elements in experience is not 
an ultimate one is the following : It is maintained that every 
attempt to bring before the attention pure and simple, a mere 
material element, reveals that what we actually succeed in attend- 
ing to contains or implies other elements, formal elements, as well. 
For instance, we are conscious of the color red. But reflection 
shows us, not merely that we think of the color red as somehow 
spread out, definitely or indefinitely, in space ; but also that the 
mere consciousness that this is red implies a discrimination between 
this and other colors ; implies, that is, a consciousness of relations, 
a classification and separation of different elements. What the 
consciousness of red alone would be, we cannot, it is claimed, 
possibly conceive. 

It is clear this reasoning, too, arises out of a confusion. It may 
perfectly well be admitted that we are not normally conscious of 
single sensations all by themselves, and that our total conscious- 
ness at any time is something highly complex. But, as we have 
seen, it is possible by an act of attention to single out and in a 
certain sense cause to stand forth individually, for a passing 
moment, elements of consciousness which form a very small part of 
that total of which they form a part. We cannot banish all the 
rest of consciousness into nothingness, and we cannot hold such 
elements clearly and permanently in the foreground of our thought. 
1 T. H. Green, " Prolegomena to Ethics," § 20. 



66 The Content of Consciousness 

But we can distinguish between these elements and others ; we 
can retain them in the attention while those with which they are 
associated vary, as is evidenced by the formation of concepts or 
general notions ; and we can indicate to others by the use of lan- 
guage that it is these particular elements that we are interested 
in for the time being and not others. The denial of such a power 
makes the procedure of thought in analyzing and comparing com- 
plex experiences wholly incomprehensible. 

But if this be admitted, it must also be admitted that we can 
distinguish between the color red and any relations in which it 
may stand to other things in our consciousness, as well as between 
the color itself and any other material elements with which it 
may be combined. To think of the color red and abstract from 
other elements given with it, it is by no means necessary to reduce 
our consciousness to a something whose sole content is an ex- 
perience of red color. And yet, by thus abstracting from other 
elements we may represent to ourselves, with a greater or less 
approach to accuracy, what would be the experience of a con- 
sciousness thus limited in content. We do not make our whole 
consciousness representative of the content of such a conscious- 
ness ; we search among its elements and try to single out from all 
others only that which will truly represent such a content. It may 
be difficult in any given case to perform this task with accuracy ; 
it may be hard to strip away all that ought to be stripped away; 
but there is no theoretical impossibility of performing such an 
operation. We do something of the kind every time that we think 
of this person or of that as thinking of this or that. We never 
suppose that our whole experience is representative of such a per- 
son's thought ; we merely single out from it so much as we think 
may be truly representative, and, for the time being, we abstract 
from the rest. 

There is, hence, no theoretical difficulty in distinguishing be- 
tween the material and the formal elements in our experience ; in 
" thinking of " a pure sensation which does not stand in relation 
to other things. Of course we cannot hold such an element of 
our experience before the attention in the same vivid way in which 
we can represent to ourselves more complex experience, trees, 
houses, animals. But there is much that cannot thus be held 
before the attention, which we must still recognize as " thought 
of," and our thought of such things may be, and indeed is, such an 



The Elements in Consciousness 67 

essential constituent of our mental life, that it could not go on 
without it. 

The question may very justly be raised whether, when we 
attempt to analyze into their constituents the complexes given 
in our experience, we may conceivably hope to arrive by this 
process at ultimate elements, in their nature incapable of further 
analysis, or whether we must always and unavoidably expect to 
find before us further complexes susceptible of a similar treatment. 
In the preceding chapter it has been pointed out that it is rash to 
assume that any given experience is not further analyzable, merely 
on the ground that it does not at once reveal itself to be complex. 
Direct introspection is too coarse an instrument to reveal all the 
parts of that which we may have good reason to believe composed 
of parts. But this prudent reflection leaves unanswered the ques- 
tion whether there is a point at which a further analysis becomes, 
in the nature of the case, impossible, or whether the process of 
subdivision by analysis is theoretically without limit. 

Various considerations may be advanced in support of the 
latter of these alternatives. " Abstract the many relations from 
the one thing," argues Mr. Green,i "and there is nothing." We 
have seen that there is no great force in his argument, for it is 
substantially the one criticised above as denying the fundamental 
distinction between form and matter. It may be held again that, 
since space and time are infinitely divisible, every experience given 
in space and time must be infinitely divisible, too, and it is hopeless 
to attempt to isolate the simple and uncompounded. For an answer 
to this objection we must wait, as I have indicated above, until we 
come to certain chapters in which the nature of space and time is 
more carefully investigated. It will there appear that no true 
argument may be drawn from this source against the possible 
existence of ultimate and unanalyzable consciousness-elements. 

But it may be urged still again that we cannot know a thing 
without knowing what it is, and that it is impossible to know 
what it is without comparing it with other things, i.e, without 
defining or classifying it. Definition seems to imply the resolution 
of the object defined into its constituent elements. If we defime 
man, in the traditional way, to be a rational animal, we give genus 
and difference — what assimilates him to other objects belonging 
to a certain class, and what marks him out from all other objects 
1 "Prolegomena to Ethics," § 28. 



68 The Content of Consciousness 

of that class. Anything that we cannot thus separate into its 
elements we cannot define, and anything which we cannot define 
we cannot recognize as similar to or different from anything else. 
Such a thing can in no true sense be an object of knowledge, for 
we simply do not know what it is. 

It is not hard to discover in this argument a confusion between 
the thing of which we are supposed to be talking and the relations 
in which this tiling may stand to other things. If to know what a 
thing is is taken as meaning to know the thing in its relations to 
other things, of course it follows that a single element of con- 
sciousness, abstracted from all others, cannot be known as this 
thing or that. To know what a thing is appears to be equivalent 
to knowing the thing and a number of other things besides. No 
reasonable man would care to deny that such a knowledge as this 
must be complex. 

But we do not accept such a knowledge as an absolute unit 
and use it as such; we separate it into its constituents, and run over 
these one by one. We distinguish the thing itself from the rela- 
tions in which it stands to other things, and we distinguish single 
relations from each other. The only question about which there 
can be any legitimate dispute is, whether, in every case, these 
constituents of our admittedly complex experience must be, in their 
turn, complex. Undoubtedly each of them may be grouped with 
other elements, we may seek to know what each is by bringing it into 
relation with all sorts of other things; but this does not in the least 
imply that we confuse it with the other things with which we bring 
it into relation, or with the relations in which it stands to such. Tlie 
thing (I use the word in the broadest possible sense) is not strictly 
identical with any of these, and is not proved to be complex by 
pointing out that when it is combined with these the result is a 
complex. 

A knowledge that a thing is, and a knowledge of what a thing 
is, if by the latter we mean to indicate a knowledge of the thing 
in relation to other things, should be carefully distinguished from 
each other. It is not legitimate to assume that, because we do not 
happen to have the latter, we do not have any knowledge at all. 
If it is possible to distinguish, as we have seen it is, between some 
object in consciousness and the relations in which this object stands 
to others, there certainly ought to be some word to indicate the 
consciousness of that object abstracted from the relations in wliich 



The Elements in Consciousness 69 

it stands to others, and it ought to be possible to contrast such a 
knowledge with a knowledge which includes these relations. The 
force of the objection made above to the presence in consciousness 
of simple elements evidently depends upon the tacit assumption 
that it is impossible to know a thing in any manner whatever 
without knowing what it is, in the manner described. Such an 
assumption is sufficiently refuted by showing that it is impossible 
even to describe the complicated process of knowing what a thing 
is, without recognizing the presence of acts of knowledge of a 
more elementary kind. The question of the propriety of using 
the word "know" to indicate such is a purely verbal one, and 
need not detain us. 

It is worth while to point out that this argument against the 
possibility of knowing simple elements in consciousness may be 
urged with equal force against the possibility of knowing complexes 
in consciousness which have not yet been analyzed. The most 
ardent champion of the composite nature of our experience will 
hardly maintain that all that enters into his experience is, not 
merely analyzable, but already analyzed. It must follow that 
whatever he has not at any time analyzed is unknown ; and if 
it is a fair argument to 'bring against simple elements in con- 
sciousness that they are unknown, it is an equally fair argu- 
ment to bring against unanalyzed complexes that they are 
unknown also. That they can be known does not remove the 
difficulty, for they can be known only by the substitution for them 
of other unknown things, i.e. other unanalyzed complexes. All 
knowledge must rest upon the unknown as much in the one case as 
in the other, the only difference being that here the unknown 
becomes a shifting one. But it is not worth while to spend much 
time over this argument for the necessarily composite nature of all 
our mental states. The fundamental error upon which it rests is 
that, while it insists upon their complexity and maintains that we 
can always discern them to be composed of parts, it fails to recog- 
nize that this very doctrine necessarily implies that we must in some 
way be singly conscious of those parts or we could not recognize 
our complex as a complex. It has no name for such a conscious- 
ness of the parts of a complex experience. 

There is, indeed, good reason to believe that our sensations and 
our " ideas " are composed of simple elements. From all that has 
preceded, it will be readily understood that it is impossible to prove 



70 TJie Content of Consciousness 

this fact by direct introspection. The only way to prove it is to 
show that such an assumption harmonizes best with our knowledge 
as a whole, and offers the least difficulties, and that a satisfactory 
explanation can be given of the fact that men of intelligence 
embrace the contrary doctrine and defend it with ardor. As to the 
formal element in consciousness, it has been maintained that rela- 
tions should be treated in a coherent way, distinguished as distinct 
from each other when they occur at different places or different 
times, and, in short, reasoned about very much as we reason about 
sensations. It seems to follow that complex relations may be 
analyzed into simple ones, and that there may be simplest relations 
which resist any further analysis. Certainly geometrical reason- 
ings recognize the presence of complexes, and endeavor to deter- 
mine the constituents which enter into their composition. But 
when all this is admitted, it must be acknowledged that we have no 
such knowledge of the contents of consciousness as would make 
possible a detailed description of the individual elements which 
compose it, and there is small hope that such a knowledge will be 
attained within any assignable limit of time. If exception be 
taken to the use of the word " description " in such a connection, 
one may say, instead, such a knowledge as would enable us to 
represent to ourselves truly the simple elements which enter into 
our complex experiences. What it is to represent anything has 
already been explained. 



CHAPTER V 
THE SELF OR KNOWER 

Doubtless it has seemed to many of those who have read the 
preceding chapter that its most characteristic feature is one glaring 
omission. Where is the hero of the whole piece ? Where is the 
self that perceives sensations, has memories, pictures ideal scenes, 
distinguishes between material and formal elements, and bustles 
about upon the stage before which the curtain has been raised? 
To deny the existence of this self, and to deny that it is immedi- 
ately perceived to busy itself in divers ways seems little short of 
madness. Do we not say : I see, I hear, I touch, I taste, I smell, 
I think, I feel, I will? A sensation is always experienced by 
some one ; a thought is thought by some one ; an emotion does not 
float about unattached, like a storm-tossed bit of seaweed, or a dry 
leaf riding on the wind. It is useless to try to persuade the plain 
man that he is not conscious of himself as well as of other things, 
and that he does not do and suffer. As well try to persuade him 
that he has no consciousness at all. 

But it is a misconception of what has been said in the preced- 
ing chapter to suppose that it denies these experiences upon which 
the plain man so stoutly insists, and which certainly no one has a 
right to overlook. We are conscious of self, and we do have 
experiences that we call knowing, feeling, willing, comparing, etc. 
In the last chapter, however, we were not concerned with complex 
experiences as complexes, but were endeavoring to fix certain 
broad distinctions which mark the elements of which these are 
composed. We were concerned with the elements of conscious- 
ness merely, and can be accused of an oversight only if it can be 
shown that in our complex experiences there is present something 
that cannot be made to fall within any of the classes there recog- 
nized ; something so different that it must stand alone and as con- 
trasted with all else. That the experiences adduced above contain 
such an element cannot be satisfactorily established by accepting 

71 



72 The Content of Consciousness 

the testimony of the plain man, who knows little, as we have seen, 
of the separate elements which enter into his experience, and is 
capable of giving very foolish answers when he is asked to indi- 
cate them ; and it is equally clear that even the psychologist can- 
not depend upon so coarse an instrument as direct introspection in 
the ultimate analysis of mental complexes, and has no right to say 
offhand just what elements they do or do not contain. 

Hence, it is no refutation of the preceding account of the con- 
tent of consciousness merely to adduce the experience which we 
call the consciousness of self, and to point to the fact of knowledge. 
He who accepts that account will maintain that these things are 
complexes, which may be resolved into the elements he has recog- 
nized, and which can only be clearly understood when they are 
seen to be capable of such an analysis. He will insist that he is 
not denying the experiences at all, but is merely showing what 
they really are, and is clearing away needless obscurity and mis- 
conception. It is, of course, possible to hold that his analysis is 
an unsatisfactory one. But one who takes this position should 
not content himself with baldly stating that fact ; he should prove 
it by showing that it does not satisfactorily adjust itself to our 
knowledge as a whole ; and he should likewise show that what he 
lias to offer in place of it does not contain what is incomprehensible 
and self-contradictory. It is of importance to remark that both 
parties to the dispute accept such experiences as the conscious- 
ness of self and the knowledge of things. The only question at 
issue is : How are such experiences to be analyzed, or are they to 
be analyzed at all ? 

Those who hold that in addition to the elements which have 
above been recognized as constituting the content of consciousness, 
there must also be recognized a self or knower, which cannot be 
resolved into a number of such elements, but must be regarded as 
something of a quite different kind, lay emphasis upon such ex- 
pressions as : I see, I hear, I think, and the experiences which they 
call up. A sight cannot see itself, they insist, nor can a sound hear 
itself. Thought without a thinker is something incomprehensible. 
Are we, they ask, to regard it as without significance that we speak 
of " bringing objects within the focus of attention," " directing " the 
attention to this or that, or " holding " something before the atten- 
tion ? Do we not in the use of such phrases plainly indicate that 
there is a something which is busying itself about the objects, 



The Self or Knower 73 

turning, in a certain sense of that word, toward them or from them, 
summoning them before it or dismissing them as no longer of in- 
terest ? Such phrases have been freely used in the preceding pages, 
and it may be asked with what right this has been done, when it 
is denied that there exists anything that either " brings " objects 
before it or " directs " attention to them. 

Furthermore, and this is perhaps the point upon which the most 
emphasis is laid at the present day, it is pointed out that conscious- 
ness is highly complex, and yet our knowledge may be said to 
possess a certain unity. Colors, sounds, tastes, touches, memories 
— why does not every element of these exist absolutely by itself 
and for itself? Why does each stand in relation to other ele- 
ments aud help to form a whole ? Things are known together : we 
run over many elements in succession, and then group them as a 
total : we do not lose one in gaining the other, nor does one take 
the place of the other; they exist in our thought side by side, and 
constitute its parts. Two sensations in the mind of one man belong 
to each other in a very different way from two sensations each of 
which exists in the mind of a separate man. Whence the differ- 
ence ? Does it not seem as if the mind itself gave this unity to its 
contents, knit together elements which would otherwise fall hope- 
lessly apart, if, indeed, they could exist at all? Must not some 
principle of unity be assumed, if the coexistence of things in any 
fashion is to be rendered comprehensible ? 

To some of these questions it is not possible to give a complete 
answer at the present stage of our discussion. But it is suffi- 
ciently easy to point out that the assumption of a " knower " to per- 
form the various functions indicated above is a gratuitous one, and 
rests upon misconception. Any principle or agent the existence 
of which is assumed in order to account for certain experienced 
facts should really account for them ; that is, it should be capable 
of making comprehensible the manner of their occurrence. It will 
not do to make the facts their own explanation, to assume the exist- 
ence of an agent whose whole being is, as it were, a shadow cast by 
the things it is assumed to explain. It was thus that " occult " qual- 
ities were once assumed as the explanation of observed phenomena ; 
that the possession of a " dormitive virtue ^' was made to account 
for the soporific properties of opium. It is thus that mental "fac- 
ulties " of various kinds are still used in some quarters to explain the 
divers sorts of mental phenomena. How the dormitive virtue of 



74 The Content of Consciousness 

opium brings about its results, and how mental " faculties " produce 
their effects it is not pretended to explain. It is simply assumed 
that they are the causes of the phenomena under observation ; and 
since all occurrences must, in the nature of things, have adequate 
causes of their existence, it is assumed that these causes must be ad- 
equate to produce these effects. It is evident that any such expla- 
nation adds no whit to our knowledge of the thing to be explained. 
It is, as has been said, nothing more than the shadow cast by the 
fact itself. 

If, therefore, we are to assume the existence of a " knower" or 
" self " distinct from the elements recognized in the preceding pages 
as constituting our consciousness, we must be able to prove that 
we are not dealing with a shadow of this kind ; we must show, and 
not merely say, that such a self can perform the functions attributed 
to it. We must, in short, have something to stand upon other 
than the mere facts it is desired to explain. 

Here it may be objected that we have at least the existence of 
the self given in consciousness, whereas no one pretends to perceive 
directly either the dormitive virtue of opium or the mental facul- 
ties distinct from the various classes of mental phenomena. And 
it may be maintained that if this be so, even if we cannot describe 
in detail how the self knows things and does things, we can at 
least assert with confidence that it exists, and is somehow con- 
cerned in these operations. Such a fact alone would be enough to 
take it out of the shadowy realm of occult qualities, and make our 
explanation, if incomplete, at least something more than a mere 
tautology. 

But it should be borne in mind that the very point in dispute 
is the existence in consciousness of such a self as is here claimed. 
Were the self a something in consciousness that stood out vividly, 
as do material objects which we examine under a good light, the 
quarrel would be settled at once. That it is not something which 
can be thus inspected, any one can satisfy himself by attempting 
to get a good look at it and to describe it. Its indefinite and elu- 
sive character is abundantly evidenced by the efforts which have 
been made by philosophers and psychologists to give a satisfactory 
account of it, and by their attribution to it of incomprehensible 
and contradictory qualities. It is very clear that they have been 
groping in the dark, and have not been describing something seen 
under a good liglit. Hence, the existence in consciousness of such 



The Self or Knower 75 

a self as is described above must not be assumed at the outset, but 
must be reached, if at all, as the result of a process of reasoning. 
It must be shown that the assumption is a reasonable one, and that 
by the assumption of such a something in consciousness we can 
explain how attention is directed to this or that, how diverse ele- 
ments in a consciousness are held together in a certain unity. 

This demand is not met by those who assume the existence of 
the self under discussion. Their assumption is not a purely gra- 
tuitous one, and it can be given at least a psychological explanation, 
as will be shown below. But it does not really explain any of 
the facts it is desired to explain, and on examination it proves to 
be no better than the assumption of "occult" qualities. 

For example, although it is insisted that this self knows the 
other things in consciousness, it is not in the least indicated how 
it knows them. What is its knowledge, and wherein does it 
consist ? The thing known is what it is, and the knower is what 
it is. They are distinct and different; what is the bond which 
unites them ? Is the knowledge something distinct and different 
from both knower and known ? What manner of thing is it, and 
how shall we represent it to ourselves ? If one thing can know 
another different from it, what nature must it have in order to 
exercise this function? Why cannot one sensation know another, 
or a picture in the memory know an emotion ? Can we represent 
to ourselves with any degree of clearness some element ^ in con- 
sciousness which stands to the other elements in a wholly different 
relation from that in which they stand to each other? Can we 
endow it with some attribute which will make comprehensible its 
activity in knowing? 

To all such questions we receive no answer. The whole sub- 
ject lies buried in Egyptian darkness, and we are forced to content 
ourselves with words and phrases, with mere repetitions of the 
statement that the knower does know. When we are told that 
the walker does walk, it means something to us ; he possesses 
legs, and his activity is not incomprehensible. But the knowing 
of the knower remains something occult ; it lies in a well so deep 
that there is no evidence that truth is to be found at the bottom. 

So it is also when we weigh the phrases which are used to indi- 
cate the movements of the attention. That some elements in 

1 As the reader may see, I use the word " element " here in rather a loose sense ; 
I found no argument upon the mere word. 



76 llie Content of Consciousness 

consciousness stand out more vividly than others, and that there is 
constant change in this respect, we know by direct observation. 
But when we speak of " directing " the attention or " holding " 
something before the attention, do we mean to indicate that one 
element in consciousness, the self or knower, is perceived to be 
treating another element in some definite way ? The phrases have, 
of course, their origin in a material analogy. A man holds an 
object before him in his hand when he wishes to look at it ; he 
turns his head and directs his eyes toward another object which 
he wishes to examine. But these are bodily movements, and 
serve only as a rude image of the peculiar activity attributed to 
the knower. What is the nature of that activity? How does 
the self in consciousness make some elements advance into a posi- 
tion of greater prominence and others retreat into obscurity? 
We are granted no hint of the nature of its activity, and it appears 
to be assumed that it can do such things, for no better reason than 
that such things do happen. 

Finally, we ask, how does the knower, an element in conscious- 
ness among other elements, hold things together and create a 
unity in diversity ? If this knower is any way composite, it is 
fair to ask what holds its parts together ; and if it is not com- 
posite, but exists as a simple element of some sort in consciousness, 
we may well inquire what means such an element possesses for 
holding together other elements different from itself. Hands it 
has not ; and mere material analogies will not serve to make clear 
the method of its procedure. How can a self hold together colors 
and sounds, any better than a sensation of touch can hold together 
tastes and smells ? Can even the faintest hint be given of what 
it is to thus hold things together ? If it cannot, it is very clear 
that we are dealing with mere words, and are not in the least 
explaining the unity of consciousness and the knowing of things 
together. In reasoning thus we are first assuming that an expla- 
nation is necessary, that things would not stay together unless 
held together, and then taking refuge in an occult quality as fur- 
nishing the explanation desired ; in other words, we are simply 
making a fact to be explained, its own explanation. 

It seems odd that reasonings so loose should impress any 
thoughtful person as worthy of acceptance, but, as has been indi- 
cated, it is possible to give at least a psychological explanation of 
the fact that they carry conviction to many minds. Their influ- 



The Self or Knoioer 77 

ence is not incomprehensible when we reflect upon the genesis of 
the traditional knowing self that has been such a stone of stum- 
bling to the speculative mind. 

It is generally accepted among psychologists that, at an early 
stage of the mind's development, the chief constituent of the 
notion of the self, and perhaps the only one that stands out with 
sufficient clearness to occupy the attention, is the idea of the body. 
When the child says, " I see," " I hear," " I feel," he is not think- 
ing of the self of the philosophers, but is recognizing the fact that, 
given his body in such and such a relation to other objects, he has 
certain experiences. His body stands over against other objects 
and is distinguished from them. It sees with its eyes, hears with 
its ears, feels with its hands. It not only sees, hears, and feels 
other objects, but also sees, hears, and feels itself. It perceives 
not merely that it is acted upon, but also that it acts upon other 
things, bringing about changes in them. It is the constant factor 
in experience, while the objects with which it occupies itself suc- 
ceed one another in a more or less rapid succession. Moreover, 
it is an interesting object, with which are bound up in a peculiar 
manner the pains and pleasures of the individual. No wonder 
it becomes the centre of the little world in which it has its being, 
a world concrete, unreflective, external, if I may be permitted to 
use this relative word when the correlative cannot as yet be 
regarded as having made its way into the light of clear conscious- 
ness — at least a world objective and material in the sense that 
what comes later to be recognized as objective and material 
almost wholly constitutes it. And from the crude materialism of 
the infant mind to the crude animism of the savage the step is 
but a short one. That duplicate of the body, which in dreams 
walks abroad, sees and is seen, and acts as the body acts, has 
simply taken the place of the body as knower and doer, and its 
knowing and doing obtain their significance in the same experi- 
ence. The thought of the child is duplicated in the new world 
opened up by the beginnings of reflection. 

Now, I believe that the student of the history of philosophy 
who is able to read between the lines can see in the highly abstract 
and inconsistent self of the later philosophers a something that 
has grown by a process of refinement from these rude beginnings. 
We find early in the history of thought a material soul which 
knows things by contact with the effluxes thrown off from mate- 



78 The Content of Consciousness 

rial objects. It is an object among other objects, as is the body, 
and the nature of its knowing is clearly analogous to that of the 
body. We have, later, a soul in part fettered to the body, and, 
as it were, semi-material. We have, finally, a soul abstract and 
unmeaning, a shade, a survival from a more concrete and unre- 
flective past. 

It would be wearisome to attempt anything like an exhaustive 
examination of the opinions of philosophers, ancient and modern, 
in support of the above assertion, but a mere glance at a few of 
them may not be out of place. The philosophers have recog- 
nized, almost from the beginning, the distinction between that 
which knows, the mind, soul, or reason, and thing known, which 
may be either an external thing or a psychical state. 

It is difficult to select from among such a cloud of witnesses, 
but I may mention, in passing, among the ancients, Anaxagoras, 
Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the 
Sceptics, in all of whom the distinction is sufficiently emphasized. 
Thales doubtless distinguished in an unanalytic way between him- 
self and the objects of his knowledge, but in what little we know 
of his doctrine, his ideas upon this subject do not come to the 
surface. Perhaps the problem of knowledge had not presented 
itself to him as a problem. With the progress of reflective thought 
it comes more and more into view, and the knower grows, I cannot 
say more definite, but at least more definitely an object of discus- 
sion. At the same time the knower grows on the whole less con- 
crete and material, though the chronological order and the order 
of logical development do not absolutely coincide. This is easily 
seen when one compares the teachings of Anaxagoras and Democ- 
ritus with what Plato and Aristotle have to tell us of the nature 
of the mind. The distinction made by the latter between the 
reason and the lower psychical functions has a flavor of the mod- 
ern distinction between the rational and the empirical self, a topic 
upon which we shall have occasion to dwell a little below. 

It is not necessary to enter into detail in speaking of matters 
so familiar as these to students of philosophy. It is sufficient to 
remind them that the impression which the Greek philosophy as 
a whole makes upon the modern mind, notwithstanding the devel- 
opment which it took in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, is that 
it represents the thought of a people to whom it was not un- 
natural to think of the mind as a breath, a fire, a collection of 



The Self or Knower 79 

atoms, — a something not widely different from the body, and the 
relation of which to the objects of its knowledge was essentially 
similar to that which obtains between the body and the objects 
which surround it. And it is well to remember that, even when 
Aristotle has endeavored to purge his notion of the Divine Mind, 
the First Cause of Motion, of all material elements, he can still 
conceive of it as touching the world, although it remains itself un- 
touched.^ It sets the spheres revolving, after all, in somewhat 
the same way in which the Nous of Anaxagoras sets in motion the 
little particles which are by their combinations to form a world. 

Such a conception of the nature of the self or knower does not 
appear very different from that entertained by one who has gotten 
so far as to distinguish between mind and body, but has not re- 
flected much upon his conception of mind. To be sure, we moderns 
are not in the position of the ancient Greek. There has been much 
speculation upon these matters since, and the fruits of this specu- 
lation have to a great extent become common property. Even the 
plain man has heard the soul spoken of as immaterial, and he is 
apt to repudiate with energy all talk of identifying it with atoms, 
or attributing to it extension in space. Nevertheless, he conceives 
it as in some vague way within his body, and present to the objects 
of its knowledge. When he has learned something of the impres- 
sions made upon the sense-organs, and of the knowledge of things 
through representative images, his doctrine may justly be regarded 
as merely a refinement of the ancient doctrine of effluxes from 
objects, which penetrate to the mind through the avenues of the 
senses. Whatever inherited and contradictory forms of expres- 
sion he may use in describing the mind, he nevertheless thinks of 
it as a thing among other things, present to them in somewhat the 
same way in which the body is present to the objects upon which 
it directs its eyes ; and when he speaks of the mind as knowing, 
it is this latter experience that gives its content and significance 
to his thought. 

He does not take quite seriously the refinements of later specu- 
lation, for, indeed, they cannot really be taken verj^ seriously. 
They can be assented to only in words. As early as Plotinus the 
soul or subject of knowledge has definitely put on the incompre- 
hensible aspect with which later speculation so constantly clothed 

1 Gen. et Corr., I, 6, 322, b, 21. See also Zeller, " Die Philosophie der Griechen, 
Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker," Leipzig, 1879, pp. 357, 377. 



80 The Content of Consciousness 

it. It is not in space ; or rather it is in space in an unintelligible 
and inconsistent way; it is all in the whole, and yet all in every 
part of the body. It is divided because it is in all parts of the 
body, and undivided because it is in its entirety in every part.^ 
With Augustine, who set his stamp so authoritatively upon the 
thinking of the centuries that succeeded his own, it behaves no 
better, being still all in the whole and all in every part of the 
body .2 It knows itself and what is not itself. Its properties are 
not related to it as material qualities are to material substance ; 
they share in its substantiality, although it has them, and must 
not be regarded as being them. The knowledge of the mind ex- 
tends beyond the spiritual substance. Objects of sense become 
known because they are touched by the various senses. Material 
qualities, on the other hand, are coextensive with the substances 
in which they inhere, and they fall within the same limits.^ To 
make this confusion, if possible, worse, Cassiodorus maintains that 
the soul, which knows things spiritual and material, is, as a whole, 
in each of its own parts. 

It is, of course, impossible for any human being to represent to 
himself so inconsistent an entity as a soul of this description. If 
he asserts that he believes in it, we must charitably suppose that 
he thinks he does so, and must then endeavor to find out for 
ourselves what is really in his thought. In many instances it is 
possible to discover the motive which has lead serious men to 
make statements so fantastic, and seemingly so arbitrary. In the 
endeavor to distinguish clearly between mind and body, they have 
gotten farther and farther away from that primary experience in 
which the body plays so important a part, and which furnishes the 
first foundation for the idea of one thing standing over against 
another and knowing it. But it is clear that the}' have not elimi- 
nated this wholly from their thought. They make the mind, as it 
were, an inconsistent little body, an ill-behaved atom, which is in 
space and yet not exactly in space ; present to things, and yet not 
present to things as bodies are present to each other. This makes 
it and its knowing something very vague, but there is present at 
least a suggestion, drawn from experience, that prevents the sen- 
tences used to describe them from impressing the mind as a quite 
meaningless form of words. 

1 " Ennead," IV, 2, 1. 2 " De Trinitate," VI, 8. 

8 " De Civitate Dei," IX, 5-8 ; " De Trinitate," X, 10 ; XII, 26 ; X, 4. 



The Self or Knoiver 81 

In the scholastic philosoph}^ Ave find much the same concep- 
tions as in the period preceding it. Everywhere there is acknowl- 
edged a knower and a known ; and this knower, which knows both 
itself and what is not itself, and ma}^ even know itself more cer- 
tainly than it knows external objects, remains throughout a mystery 
and a perplexity. And in the modern philosophy, until we come 
to Hume, the problem of knowledge remains much what it was 
before. With Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes the mind is still the 
knower, and a vague and shadowy knower. 

It is interesting to see that Descartes, who announces an inten- 
tion never to be governed in his thinking by tradition and authority, 
and a determination to accept as true only what he clearly and 
distinctly perceives to be true, nevertheless held to the vaguely 
and inconsistently localized soul of the Schoolmen and their prede- 
cessors. He places the soul, it is true, in the little pineal gland 
in the midst of the brain ; but for him that is only its " chief seat " ; 
it is, so to speak, thickened doivn at that point in the body, but it 
retains its nebulous scholastic diffusion throughout the body not- 
withstanding its predilection for this convenient spot. It is like a 
divinity which can best be influenced by supplication at a given 
shrine, but whose sphere is not circumscribed wholly by it. Still, 
the reader of Descartes must feel, that even this half-hearted 
attempt to place the soul somewhere, in an intelligible sense of 
that word, is a move in the direction of an earlier conception, and, 
hence, a move in the direction of intelligibility. It at least means 
something to speak of this or that as in the pineal gland ; it does 
not really mean anything to speak of it as in its entirety in several 
places at once. And he must also feel, I think, if he be one of 
those who must have the traditional knower, that a localization in 
the pineal gland seems to make it more comprehensible that a 
knower should actually know things. Did not Descartes provide 
for the delivery of all sorts of messages to it at that little central 
office ? Do not things to be known come to the knower ? 

The position taken by Spinoza is especially interesting and 
suggestive. The mind he regards as the " idea " of the body, as 
that mode in the attribute thought which corresponds to the body, 
a parallel mode in the attribute extension. Mind and body do not 
interact ; they merely correspond, since they are aspects of the one 
thing. Man is a physical automaton with parallel psychical states. 
The mind is a complex of ideas, and may be called the knowledge 



82 The Content of Consciousness 

of the body. But there is also such a thing as the idea or knowl- 
edge of the mind. We not only know things, but we know that 
we know. How shall we conceive this knowledge ? Spinoza 
maintains that this knowledge of the mind is related to the mind 
precisely as the mind is related to the body. He finds it impos- 
sible, it is true, to keep this " idea " of the mind distinct from the 
mind itself, since they are both modes in the one attribute, thought, 
and are not different modes. He first distinguishes them and then 
lets them melt into each other. 

His doctrine is not consistent, but its purpose is clear. It 
appears to him that knowledge demands a knower and a known, 
and he cannot conceive the knower as playing the part of both. 
He therefore explains the mind's knowledge of itself by splitting 
it into a fictitious duality, which fades again into unity. He thus 
rids himself of that inconceivable chimera the "subject-object," 
which knows itself; and his thought retains a sufficiently vivid 
suggestion of that experience from which our notion that one 
thing in our experience can know another is drawn. It is interest- 
ing to remark that to Spinoza the mind is composed of ideas ; it is 
not a something distinct from them and behind them ; and it is 
not localized in the inconsistent fashion which obtained in Scho- 
lasticism and in the philosophy which preceded it. 

In Locke there appears again the ambiguous double self, the 
substance or substratum, and the qualities or attributes in which 
it makes itself manifest. It is the latter that we directly perceive ; 
the former remains " an uncertain supposition of we know not 
what," but to which is attributed the function of holding together 
the ideas. Berkeley, the Idealist, basing himself upon Locke's 
conclusions, classifies the objects of human knowledge as ideas of 
sense, ideas of memory and imagination, the passions and operations 
of the mind, and the self that perceives all these. Those who are 
familiar with the " Principles " will remember that even Berkeley's 
clear and graceful sentences leave the reader's mind in a hopeless 
confusion regarding this last object and the nature of its relation 
to its own ideas. 

It is clear that none of the above doctrines give any hint of liow 
the knower is able to know things, or what sort of an activity 
knowing may be. They simply assume that there is a knower 
that knows ; and, however fantastic may be their descriptions of 
the nature of such a being, they all appear to rest ultimately upon 



The Self or Knower 83 

the experience which I have adduced as the most probable explana- 
tion of the whole notion of things knowing each other. It is not 
without significance that the act of knowing appears to grow more 
and more unintelligible as the knower becomes more refined and 
sublimated. But before proceeding further it is desirable to mark 
certain distinctions of much importance to clear thinking, but 
which were not so clearly marked as they might have been, or at 
least were not given due weight, in the mediaeval and in the mod- 
ern philosophy down to the period at which we have arrived. 

Leaving out Spinoza, the writers whom I have cited appear 
to recognize, explicitly or implicitly, a dual element in the self or 
knower. It is a substance or substratum with certain properties or 
attributes. Locke dwells at great length upon this distinction, 
and concludes that the properties of the knower or self may be 
known immediately — they are elements in consciousness, or, as 
he expresses it, ideas of reflection. The "substratum" self he 
banishes to outer darkness, and after proving that there is no con- 
ceivable way by which we can arrive at a knowledge of its exist- 
ence,^ he assumes it to exist, by an act of violence. 

He maintains, moreover, occupying, as he does, what we have 
called the psychological standpoint, that our immediate knowledge, 
in so far as it is not a knowledge of self, is a knowledge merely of 
sense-ideas, or representative images of things. The things them- 
selves lie beyond these and can only be known to exist by infer- 
ence. Berkeley, his successor, denied the justice of such an 
inference ; and while holding, apparently, to a self not very differ- 
ent from that put forward by Locke, refused to recognize Locke's 
external things at all. Hume, that astute and admirable analyst, 
applied Berkeley's argument to the " substratum " self as well as 
to external things, and concluded the self or mind, and by this he 
means to include all that is immediately known, to be "but a 
bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each 
other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and 
movement." 

Whatever may be thought of the conclusions arrived at by 
these philosophers, it will be admitted that we have here at least 
a clear recognition of the distinction between immediate knowl- 
edge and mediate, facts of consciousness and that which may be 
inferred from them. This is in itself a great gain. The question 

1 " An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book I, Chapter IV, § 18. 



84 The Content of Consciousness 

of the existence or non-existence of substmta of any sort is seen 
to be a legitimate subject for investigation ; but it is accepted 
that anything not directly found in consciousness must be indirectly 
proved to exist, and that the proof furnished must ultimately 
rest upon what is directly given in consciousness. 

W hen one reflects upon the illustration of the prisoner in the cell, 
and when one realizes what it is to know thinors mediatelv and 
through a representative, one is prepared to realize the importance 
of the distinction between phenomena and noumena^ between what 
can appear in consciousness and what is by hypothesis debarred 
from being thus known by any possibility whatever. One is also 
prepared to follow Kant in banishing noumena from the realm of 
things knowable ; indeed, one is prepared, if one be consistent, to 
go further than Kant, who appears to the unbiassed reader of the 
** Critiques *' to have done much the same thing that Locke did, to 
have denied that certain thinors could be known, and vet to have 
refused to quite let go his hold upon them. His hold, however, 
is so slight a one, and it is so manifestly in contradiction with his 
principles to retain any hold at all, that it may be assumed for the 
purposes of this discussion that he repudiated noumena altogether. 

Kant shuts up psychology to the world of experience, the phe- 
nomenal world. He is not, however, content with Hume's " bundle " 
of perceptions, but distinguishes between the multiplicity of psychi- 
cal elements forming the content of consciousness and a something, 
— not a noumenon, but a something in consciousness, — an activity, 
or whatever one may choose to call it, which makes possible the 
combination of this multiplicity into the unity of a single conscious- 
ness. On this depends the consciousness *' I think " which accom- 
panies all my ideas. The empirical self, as a complex of psychical 
elements, is to be distinguished from this rational self. This doc- 
trine has had, and still has, so deep an influence, that it is especially 
worthy of note in any historical sketch of the self as knower. 

The distinction between the empirical self and the rational has 
been taken up into modern psychology. The former is a mental 
complex which has been analyzed and discussed much as one 
analyzes and discusses any other mental content. It may, it is 
true, be difficult to enumerate the elements of which it is com- 
posed ; but tlie attitude of the psychologist toward it is sufficiently 
definite, and the only mystery that the subject presents is the mys- 
tery of incomplete knowledge. 



The Self or Knower 85 

In discussing it the psychologist at least means something. He 
applies the scientific method, aiming at and hoping for clear and 
exact results. He is dealing with sensations and memories, and 
with nothing occult and incomprehensible. Even those psycholo- 
gists who emphasize most strongly the need of a "knower" to 
explain the facts of our mental life, sometimes find in this empiri- 
cal self such elements as the idea of the body, the idea of personal 
possessions, muscular sensations of various sorts, and, indeed, just 
those things which we all recognize as making up our experience, 
which we do not think of as knowing themselves, and which some 
of us assume there must be a knower to know. This empirical self 
is admitted to be highly composite ; it is what a man has in mind 
when he thinks of himself as such and such a personality, as being 
different in capacity, training, character, and past experience from 
some one else. It was the identity of this self that was a subject 
of doubt, and needed to be established, in the case of the old woman 
who awoke with curtailed skirts : — 
" If it be I, as T hope it be, 
I've a little dog at home, and he'll know me.'* 

It seems absurd to lay upon such a self, so constituted, the bur- 
den of performing the traditional functions of a knower. How can 
it know anything, unless all sorts of elements in our experience 
can know all sorts of others? And how can it hold anything 
together? It is, at times, not even successful in "staying 
together " itself, as is clear from a study of those morbid condi- 
tions which have been classed together as diseases of the person- 
ality, as well as from those temporary derangements of the person- 
ality observed in hypnotic subjects. It needs itself to be held 
together, if anything does. 

Kant distinguishes between such a complex and the rational 
self, which is to do for this complex and for other elements in con- 
sciousness what this multiplicity of elements cannot do for itself. 
He does not make clear what this rational self is, and he gives no 
indication whatever of the way in which it brings about the results 
attributed to its activity. His idea was elaborated by his intellectual 
descendants, a rather numerous body, not entirely at one among 
themselves, but nevertheless addicted to much the same way of 
thinking. As the protagonist of these I shall take Professor 
T. H. Green, although I do not mean to make all neo-Kantians 
or neo-Hegelians responsible for all of his utterances. 



86 The Content of Consciousness 

Mr. Green repudiated the Kantian noumenon and avowedly con- 
fined human knowledge to the field of experience, but he did not 
approve a Humian experience consisting of a bundle of percepts. 
He found it necessary to assume in experience a principle of 
synthetic unity; a principle not to be confounded with any of 
the elements making up the experience, nor subject to their con- 
ditions ; a principle which, in some fashion, knits together the 
manifold of sense into an organic unity. " Thus," he writes,^ 
*' in order that successive feelings may be related objects of 
experience, even objects related in the way of succession, there 
must be in consciousness an agent which distinguishes itself from 
the feelings, uniting them in their severalty, making them equally 
present in their succession. And so far from this agent being redu- 
cible to, or derivable from, a succession of feelings, it is the condi- 
tion of there being such a succession ; the condition of the existence 
of that relation between feelings, as also of those other relations 
which are not indeed relations between feelings, but which, if they 
are matter of experience, must have their being in consciousness. 
If there is such a thing as a connected experience of related objects, 
there must be operative in consciousness a unifying principle, which 
not only presents related objects to itself, but at once renders them 
objects and unites them in relation to each other by this act of pres- 
entation ; and which is single throughout the experience." 

According to this passage, the knowing or distinguishing agent 
is conscious and self-conscious, is in consciousness, makes a con- 
sciousness possible by uniting different elements, and is single 
throughout the experience. We find elsewhere that this principle 
is not in consciousness but is consciousness, and that everything 
that exists is in it ; that it is intelligence ; that it is a subject or 
agent which desires in all the desires of a man and thinks in all 
his thoughts. Notwithstanding that it is all this, it has, neverthe- 
less, no existence except in the activity which constitutes related 
phenomena ; and it is, in the words of the author ,2 '' neither in time 
nor space, immaterial and immovable, eternally one with itself." 

The mere statement of the attributes of Mr. Green's spiritual 
principle would seem to be sufficient to condemn it. A faith 
robust enough to remove mountains might well shy fit the task 
of believing that the single subject or agent which desires in all 
the desires of a man and thinks in all his thoughts, which is con- 
1 *' Prolegomena to Ethics," § 32. 2 j^^i^ § 54. 



The Self or Knoiver 87 

scious and self-conscious, is still only an activity without existence 
except as it constitutes the objects of experience, and which, 
though it does not exist in time, is equally present to all stages of 
a change in conscious experience. This means that the activity 
which constituted my thought of yesterday did not exist yesterday, 
when my thought did ; and the activity which constitutes my 
thought of to-day does not exist to-day, while my thought does. 
Both activities are one, for the activity which constitutes objects 
is "eternally one with itself." What can this mean? If the 
phrase is to be significant at all, must it not mean that the activity 
in question is "always " the same activity? and does not " always" 
mean "at all times"? And what is an "immovable" activity? 
Moreover, is it fair to a genuine activity, however abnormal, to 
call it a principle, or subject, or agent? 

Mr. Green's utterances are not, in one sense of the word, incom- 
prehensible. His doctrine is not fundamentally new. He has 
taken the Kantian unity of apperception, made of it an hyposta- 
tized activity, tried to keep it free of space and time relations, and 
used it as an explanation of the unity of experience, or, as I should 
prefer to say, of consciousness. He has given us the same incon- 
sistent tota in toto soul that we find in Plotinus and Augustine. 
He is, to be sure, a post-Kantian, and he has included this thing 
in " experience," but it is no whit more thinkable than it was 
before. 

With all this, Mr. Green has explained nothing. Even if we 
suppose it possible for an activity to be all that he asks it to be, 
even to be timelessly present at all times, how are we to conceive 
of such a thing as uniting the elements of any possible experience ? 
Shall we merely assume that it has a vague and inscrutable 
uniting virtue, akin to the discredited dormitive virtue of opium ? 
Mr. Green does not even try to show how this activity obtains its 
result. He does not seek light upon this point by a direct reference 
to experience, for he does not obtain his activity by direct intro- 
spection ; he obtains it as the result of a labored process which 
strives to demonstrate that it must be assumed or experience will 
be seen to be impossible. 

The rational self as treated by Kant and Green appears far re- 
moved from the crude bodily self which is to the child the knower 
and doer, and also from the material or semi-material self that takes 
its place at the dawn of philosophic thought ; but it is not difficult 



88 Tlie Content of Consciousness 

to see that it appears upon the stage as a successor to these, and 
undertakes to play the same r61e. As has been pointed out, Kant 
never wholly abandoned the noumenal self which his doctrine con- 
demned. It lurked in the background of his thought, and percep- 
tibly colored it. In calling the uniting activity which he found 
in consciousness the rational self, he connected it with the notions 
which he had inherited from the past. He stands in a certain 
line of development, and must be regarded rather as modifying old 
notions than as creating something distinctly new. The same 
may be said for Mr. Green. He quite discards the noumenal self, 
it is true, but then he turns the uniting activity into something as 
incomprehensible, and forces it to perform the same functions. It 
is a subject or agent which presents objects to itself, is conscious, 
and distinguishes itself from the feelings it unites. It is somehow 
"present" to the things it knows. 

We have seen that, with this development, the self and its 
method of knowing appear to become more and more unintelli- 
gible. How the self as noumenon or as super-temporal activity 
can know anything or do anything, no one can pretend to under- 
stand. In the successive transmutations through which it has 
passed almost all reference to the primary experience out of which 
the notion of a self .as knower and doer took its rise has been lost. 
Were such reference completely lost, it would go hard with the 
hypostatized abstractions of the noumenalist and the neo-Kantian. 
As it is, they hold their own and appear not wholly without plausi- 
bility, because men really do find in their experience something 
which seems to speak for them in a certain vague and inarticulate 
way. They can form no conception of the manner in which a 
noumenon or a neo-Kantian self-activity can account for their 
experiences, but they prefer even these to nothing at all ; for must 
there not be a knower? do they not really know? 

Their position is one quite easy to understand. It is not exclu- 
sively to the childhood of the individual or of the race, that we 
need go to find the body an important element in the self idea. 
The developed man has much the same experience as the child, 
and instinctively interprets it in the same way, although reflection 
has furnished him with the means of correcting this instinctive 
interpretation. When, therefore, he speaks of perceiving himself 
among other objects, he has a more or a less immediate reference 
to an experience which he and others constantly have ; and uses 



The Self or Knower 89 

a certain expression to call attention to that experience. His 
thought may be highly nebulous and his attempts to describe it 
incoherent. Still, he means something, and it is the duty of the 
psychologist to show him what he means. Our noumenalist, or 
our neo-Kantian, thus takes his stand upon an experience, though 
he misinterprets it. He draws from experience the impulse to 
carry over into a region in which it has no right to exist, the 
notion of a bodily self. He refines this notion, he purifies it of 
all that is earthly and concrete, he starves it to a shadow of its 
former self, and yet he expects of it its former tale of bricks — 
knowing and doing. 

It is worth while to emphasize the fact that the original expe- 
rience to which we have brought back all forms of the doctrine 
of the knower, contains nothing which will justify such develop- 
ments as those which we have been discussing. The conscious- 
ness of self is a relatively permanent factor of our experience; 
and that important constituent in it, the consciousness of the body, 
is perceived to be a condition of the occurrences in consciousness 
of other experiences. Should it be objected that, not the con- 
sciousness of the body, but the body itself is the condition of the 
occurrence in consciousness of other experiences, I may answer, 
that such an absolute separation of the body from the conscious- 
ness of the body, as one makes when occupying the psychological 
standpoint has, in Chapter II, been shown to be unjustifiable. 
Were the body thus cut off from consciousness, no man could rec- 
ognize the body as a condition of conscious experiences, or as 
related to them in any way. The distinction commonly recog- 
nized between the body itself and this or that man's consciousness 
of it, cannot be made clear without a detailed examination into 
what is meant by an external world and by minds related to it. 
For the present, I shall content myself with asserting that the 
distinction, when properly understood, is seen to be a distinction 
within consciousness. I shall say, in accordance with this doc- 
trine, and without more narrowly defining the significance of the 
statement at this time, that the body — a something of which we 
are conscious — is perceived to be a condition of our having other 
experiences. By this I mean that we perceive that when we 
close our eyes, we cease to see the colors of surrounding objects, 
and when we reopen them, we again have such experiences ; that 
when we raise our hand from the table before us, we cease to feel 



90 lite Content of Consciousness 

it, and when we lower it again, we feel the table once more. 
These and many others of a similar nature are experienced facts, 
and it is natural that we should be influenced by them to connect 
the thought of the body with the thought of other experiences 
of all sorts. 

But the fact that one group of experiences is observed to be 
a condition of the appearance in consciousness of various others, 
should not be made more mysterious than it is. The group of 
experiences we call the body does not "hold together" our expe- 
riences as a whole, as the knower has been assumed to hold to- 
gether all the things that it knows. It constitutes, to be sure, a 
central point in our experience ; other things come to be grouped 
around it, and related to it. But all this gives us no such new 
and occult relation as has been imagined between knower and 
known. The body remains a complex in our experience, and we 
have before us the perfectly intelligible task of marking the pre- 
cise nature of its relations to other complexes or to single ele- 
ments, much as we mark the relation of any element to any other. 
We have no good excuse for speaking inconsistently or growing 
incoherent. 

Again : the body is made up of parts, and the parts of things 
may intelligibly stand in relations to each other, as well as may 
whole objects. A hand can touch its fellow; the eyes can, as we 
say, see the hands and the feet. Thus the body may, in a loose 
sense of the words, be said to know itself, to be the condition of 
its own appearance in consciousness. The expression is inaccu- 
rate and rather misleading, but it must not be set aside as wholly 
unmeaning ; it is based on experiences which can be described in 
detail. 

But when we get away from the notion of the bodily self, put 
in place of that a noumenon or a super-temporal activity, declare 
it to be an absolute unit^ and then maintain that it knows itself^ we 
fall into mere incoherence. There is nothing whatever in our 
experience which can serve to make intelligible to us the signifi- 
cance of such a statement. The man who maintains that one 
thing knows another, may admit that he does not know clearly 
what this relation of knowing is, but may hold that it is a relation 
of some sort between two things. Certainly the relations between 
things may be of many sorts. But he who is capable of positing 
a relation of any kind between a thing and itself, is capable of 



The Self or Knower 91 

maintaining seriously that one man may look alike or may walk 
in single file. 

It is merely playing with words to attempt to split any one thing 
into the thing and itself, distinguishing the two as knower and 
known, and at the same time asserting that knower and known are 
not really two but only one. The subject-object of the old psychol- 
ogy, the self as self-knower, is a monstrosity. It needs but a moment 
of unprejudiced reflection, it seems to me, to see that what is said 
about it is absurd and unmeaning. The only question of real 
interest is: How have men come to speak in this way? The 
answer has been given above, and it seems a sufficiently plausible 
one. A notion derived from experience of the body is carried 
over into a realm in which it wholly loses significance, and it is 
held on to notwithstanding this fact. 

In the preceding pages three different selves have been dis- 
tinguished from each other and subjected to criticism ; they are 
the self as noumenon, the self as a group of phenomena in con- 
sciousness, and the self as the neo-Kantian self-activity, whatever 
that may mean. Were we discussing any other subject, it would 
seem a work of supererogation to endeavor to show that these 
should not be confounded with each other. But here such confu- 
sion has reigned that it cannot be out of place to emphasize the 
truth that a noumenon — by definition a something which cannot 
by any possibility enter consciousness — cannot be strictly identi- 
cal with a group of elements in consciousness ; and that neither 
of these can be strictly identical with a unitary activity which is 
supposed to hold together the divers elements of which a conscious- 
ness is composed. 

When a man talks about the self, therefore, he should know 
clearly to which of the three he refers. They are evidently not one, 
and they should not be treated as one. They are not only numeri- 
cally distinct, but they are not even conceived to be similar ; and 
to the question why they should be given the same name and thus 
put into the one class, no answer save an historical one seems to be 
forthcoming. Those who hold to the existence of all three or of 
any two of these are apt to identify them loosely with each other, 
and to pass in their reasonings from the one to the other without 
clearly marking the transition. Such a procedure evidently is born 
of and gives birth to confusion of thought. 

The preceding pages have, I hope, made it clear that the nou- 



92 The Content of Consciousness 

menal self must be thrown aside as a mere figment of the imagina- 
tion, as an entity the real existence of which cannot be proved 
by any legitimate evidence based on experience, and one which 
furnishes no real explanation of anything. Its loss can cause no 
annoyance to the man who realizes what it is, and distinguishes 
between the three selves we have been discussing. 

It can surely matter nothing to me if an " I " of which I have, by 
hypothesis, never been conscious and can never be conscious ; an 
" I " which is not the " I " that I perceive myself to be and that I 
distinguish from other selves ; an " I " so different from the " I " of 
which I am conscious that its bearing the same name can only be 
explained as due to a misapprehension ; an "I " which accounts for 
nothing in my conscious experience and, indeed, turns out upon 
examination to he nothing but a name for an unknown — it can 
surely matter nothing to me if such an " I " be divested of the mis- 
conceptions which appear to give to it a semblance of substantiality 
and be made to appear the unsubstantial cipher that it is. He who 
clearly realizes just what is meant by the noumenal self, who sees 
how completely it stands outside the circle of his actual and possi- 
ble experiences, and how totally without significance it must be for 
them, can have no sense of loss in the discovery that it must be dis- 
carded. 

But it is not easy to strip off inherited misconceptions, and such 
reflections as are contained in the preceding pages are apt to bring 
to many a sense that they are being defrauded of something, a 
feeling that the self that is left them is little better than a hollow 
shell, without substance and without true reality. The feeling is a 
vague one, and cannot justify itself in the face of analysis, but it is 
rather persistent. Its disappearance can only be brought about by 
substituting a habit for a habit — the habit of clear thinking, for 
the habit of thinking loosely and vaguely. 

As to the shadowy successor of the old noumenal self, namely, 
the self as timeless self-activity, that must evidently be rejected 
also. And since it is the only self brought forward as a something 
in consciousness or in experience to be set over against all else that 
is in consciousness, and as being different in nature from all the ele- 
ments indicated in the preceding chapter, its rejection leaves us 
only what has been called the empirical self as a proper subject of 
investigation for the psychologist and the metaphysician. 

That the investigation of the nature and constitutive elements of 



The Self or Knower 93 

the empirical 'self is no easy task has already been made clear, but 
it is equally clear that the task is not in its nature a hopeless one. 
It does not differ in kind from the task which confronts us every 
time that we undertake to obtain an analytic knowledge of any 
complex in consciousness. This is true no matter what aspect of 
the empirical self we are concerned with. When we say, " I know," 
" I think," " I feel," these expressions indicate the presence of cer- 
tain complex states of consciousness. When we say, " I know 
myself as knowing," " I think about myself," etc., we indicate the 
presence of conscious states in some respects different from those 
above mentioned. It is the duty of the analyst to try to substitute 
for the vagueness which usually characterizes the recognition of 
these states of consciousness and their differences from each other 
some degree of clearness and definiteness. 

Much has been said, and much is still said, about the unity of 
consciousness. Undoubtedly, the thought of one man as knowing 
two things and the thought of two men as each knowing one thing 
are not to be confounded. When we speak of " a mind," we mean 
something, and it is perfectly just to seek to know clearly what we 
mean. But it is one thing to find in consciousness a unity and to 
endeavor to determine with definiteness what is meant by the unity 
of consciousness ; and it is another thing to attempt to explain how 
the unity of consciousness is brought about, by the assumption of 
hypothetical entities not to be found in consciousness, or by ascrib- 
ing inconceivable virtues to hypostatized spiritual activities. Hence 
the rejection of the two selves which we have weighed and found 
wanting, the noumenon and its post-Kantian successor, need not in 
the least compel us to deny to consciousness a certain unity. It is 
merely the rejection of two unsatisfactory attempts to explain how 
that unity has been brought about — attempts which not only fail 
in the aim which they have set before them, but which leave un- 
touched the much more important problem of what manner of thing 
the unity of consciousness actually is. To this problem nothing 
but a careful analysis of our experience can furnish a satisfactory 
answer. 1 

1 See Chapter XXIX. 



PART II 
THE EXTERNAL WORLD 

CHAPTER VI 
WHAT WE MEAN BY THE EXTERISTAL WORLD 

The word " consciousness," taken in the broad sense, embraces 
every element of our experience and all combinations of such 
elements. That it is impossible to pass, in any intelligible sense 
of that word, beyond this realm, we have already seen.i We can- 
not, of course, know directly what is outside of our experience, 
and an examination of representative or symbolic knowledge 
reveals 2 that it is impossible, by putting together consciousness- 
elements, to construct something truly representative of an 
external world supposed to be of a quite different nature — of a 
world which in no sense belongs to our experience or forms a part 
of it, but lies over against experience as a whole, and is contrasted 
with it. 

But if we take the word " consciousness " in a narrower sense, if 
we think of a consciousness as the particular group of experiences 
forming an individual mind, there is nothing to prevent us from 
distinguishing between consciousness and an external material 
world standing over against it, nor is there anything to prevent 
us from distinguishing between one consciousness and another. 
We certainly mean something when we speak of a world of 
matter and contrast it with the world of minds ; and we are not 
talking mere nonsense when we say that we think of this man or 
that as thinking this or that. 

These modes of expression denote real distinctions within our 
experience ; distinctions that may be, it is true, imperfectly appre- 
hended, as much that belongs to our experience may be imper- 
fectly apprehended, and may even be seriously misinterpreted. 
1 Chapter II. 2 Chapter IH. 



96 The External World 

Such a misunderstanding has arisen when one accepts as final the 
psychological doctrine of the isolation of the mind, of a knowledge 
of things external solely through representative images. That 
this doctrine must have its origin in a misapprehension becomes 
quite clear when we develop its consequences. But if we avoid 
such logical shipwreck by holding fast to the thought that those 
distinctions which we are discussing are distinctions within our 
experience, that we are in some true sense of the word conscious of 
them, we may regard it as a difficult, but we need not regard it as 
a hopeless, task to give a reasonably clear and satisfactory account 
of them. 

It is merely a question of drawing a vague and indefinite state 
of consciousness into the light of definite and analytic knowledge. 
We all know vaguely — it may be very vaguely, indeed — what we 
mean by an external material world ; and we all know dimly what 
we mean when we speak of our own or of another mind. These 
expressions are not mere noise to us ; the conceptions for which 
they stand we can use, and we do use, more or less intelligently. 

The metaphysician should strive to bring us to a better under- 
standing of what we actually have in mind when we use them. 
It ought to go without saying that we have a right to expect from 
him, when he undertakes to prove anything, the same sober con- 
duct that we expect from other men who undertake to prove 
things. He must observe the ordinary logical rules ; he must not 
speak unintelligibly, and he must not contradict himself. He must 
begin with the somewhat dim and unsatisfactory knowledge which 
characterizes unreflective thought, and he must really accept the 
fact that it is dim and unsatisfactory. He must not assume at the 
outset that he is already provided with the information which he 
sets out to seek, and is already in possession of an array of ''intui- 
tions," "necessary truths," "first and fundamental truths," and 
what not, that it is only necessary for him to describe at leisure. 
He who adopts this latter method of procedure does not really 
describe the ultimates which he assumes ; he merely enumerates 
them. He does not analyze, for he assumes that he is dealing with 
unanalyzables. He remains upon the plane of the common under- 
standing, or, at most, only skirmislies a very little beyond it. His 
writings are apt to be peculiarly satisfactory to the plain man, for 
the good reason that the latter, in following him, is not compelled 
to pass beyond his usual modes of thought. He remains the man 



What we Mean hy the External World 97 

he was, even when he becomes a philosopher — which seems a gain 
counterbalanced by no corresponding loss. 

To those who feel themselves attracted to this common-sense 
philosophy, which recognizes the distinctions with which the 
metaphysician should occupy himself — such distinctions as those 
between the mind and the external world, one consciousness and 
another, appearance and reality — but which contents itself with 
recognizing and emphasizing these distinctions, and refuses to 
analyze the conceptions which it employs into their component 
elements; to those who feel themselves attracted to this phi- 
losophy, I earnestly recommend reflection upon the lesson to be 
drawn from the experience of that remarkable man Descartes. 

We may see in Descartes a shining illustration of the fatal 
ease with which a critical mind, not a weak one, may gulp down 
into itself, and assimilate, without inconvenience, doctrines which 
appear to a later age questionable or even preposterous ; and may 
be led to do this for the one reason that it is accustomed to these 
doctrines, that these ways of conceiving things fit it like an old 
glove, and it can see in them nothing to criticise. Descartes 
began with the resolve to repudiate all his previous opinions, and 
to take back only such as could really justify themselves before 
the impartial tribunal of his reason. But when he had cleared the 
room of all occupants, and opened the door for the admission of 
the elect, there entered unchallenged (^ex uno disce omnes') o, soul 
whose ticket primarily entitled it to a seat in the pineal gland, but 
which, not content with so definitely limited a location, insisted 
upon its right — one inherited from Scholasticism — to occupy 
simultaneously all the chairs in the room. This right poor 
Descartes admitted at once ; he was accustomed to having souls 
act in that way, and he expected of them nothing better. 

From this and from a multitude of other instances which will 
suggest themselves to the student of the history of philosophy, it 
is easy to draw the inference that the fact that certain ways of 
looking at things strike us at once as natural and reasonable, does 
not necessarily prove that these are the best ways, and those in 
which the metaphysician should rest. He who would be a meta- 
physician should learn to distrust his " intuitions " ; for a multi- 
tude of things that have passed by this name have been nothing 
more than somewhat obscure conceptions, familiar and hence 
acceptable to the mind, inherited from the past, furnishing 



98 The External World 

important material for investigation, it is true, but demanding 
analysis and, perhaps, reconstruction. 

One does not become a metaphysician by simply falling back, 
for example, upon our " intuitive " (which here means " unana- 
lytic " ) knowledge that there is an external world, and that we must 
distinguish between matter and mind. One may say this over and 
over again at great length, and yet not add a whit to the clearness 
of our comprehension of the nature of these things. And if the 
doctrine of the external world, implicit in the thought of the plain 
man, and rendered somewhat more explicit by the psychologist, 
contains an inconsistency and needs reconstruction, any metaphysi- 
cal theory which simply rests in it and defends it, refusing to pass 
beyond it to something, in a sense, more unnatural, certainly more 
unaccustomed, must be vitiated by the same fault. 

Thus the metaphysician should be willing to adjust himself to 
new and unaccustomed ways of looking at things, provided that 
his reasonings, in which repeated examination can discover no 
unsoundness, seem to conduct him inevitably to such conclusions. 
If he has good reason to believe that he has reasoned well, that he 
has simply analyzed conceptions which all use but few succeed in 
analyzing, he may console himself with the reflection that those 
who oppose him do not really disagree with him, but only think 
that they do so ; that they misapprehend both their own experience 
and his analysis of it; and that they carry within themselves the 
refutation of their own words. It is to be hoped that he will give 
a very modest expression to this conviction, which is likely to be 
found highly exasperating to the opposite party. It is not every 
one that wishes to meet a sympathy so broad that it is impossible 
to go around it. 

The astute reader will have seen in the preceding pages an 
apology for the doctrine which I am about to set forth. It is a 
view of the nature of the external world which, I am glad to think, 
is not fundamentally new, even though it differs in some details 
from other doctrines with which the reader is familiar. Possibly 
some will be tempted to call it, at first glance, idealistic ; but this 
name, with the associations that cling to it, can only lead to a mis- 
apprehension of its true nature, and I must beg that the doctrine 
be allowed to remain nameless, at least until this volume has been 
read through to the end. 

In undertaking an investigation of the nature of the external 



What we Mean hy the External World 99 

material world it is perhaps convenient to begin with a concrete and 
unambiguous experience. Here is the table before me, an object 
which I cannot but believe to exist as a part of the system of 
material things. I see it ; I can touch it ; it is hard ; it is ex- 
tended ; it is colored. It appears to be as real as it is possible for 
anything to be. 

It is, be it remembered, this table before me, the one in my 
experience, about which I am in the habit of making these state- 
ments. When I speak thus, I am not talking about a little copy 
of such a table in, or somehow connected with, my brain — a 
representative, which is unlike the real table, but which in some 
inconceivable way stands for it. As we have seen,^ both the plain 
man and the psychologist assume the existence of such a represen- 
tative and confine our knowledge to it; but neither takes his 
assumption quite seriously, for he also assumes that we have direct 
experience of the real table, and his system of reasonings, his whole 
theory of originals and representatives, and of the relations between 
them, rests upon this assumption. 

The real external table is, then, a something in our experience. 
It is given in consciousness. When we have said this, we have, to 
be sure, ruled out a possible source of error, but we have not said 
very much, for there are various ways in which things may be 
given in consciousness ; and many sources of error are open to the 
man who fails to distinguish between them. If we simply maintain 
that the table of which we are speaking is, since it exists in con- 
sciousness, a state of consciousness or part of such a state, and rest 
content with that statement, we seem to obliterate completely the 
useful distinction between things and our ideas of things, a dis- 
tinction which, even though it may remain to most of us a suffi- 
ciently vague one, nevertheless appears to justify itself by the 
purposes it serves. 

That the plain man and the psychologist are not wholly wrong 
in insisting upon this distinction it is not difficult to show. They 
may point out that the actual experience of which one is conscious, 
the sensation of color which we have when, as we say, we look at 
a table, may be made to disappear at once by the very simple ex- 
pedient of closing the eyes. There, at one moment, is the table, 
vivid, undeniable, an existent sensation or mass of sensations 
directly perceived ; and, presto ! it is gone, snuffed out, replaced 

1 Chapter II. 



LflfC. 



100 The External World 

by darkness and a memory not to be confounded with the sensation 
itself. Would any man in his senses declare that the real table 
ceased to exist when this phantasm dropped into nothingness ? 
Between perceiving a table and not perceiving a table there is cer- 
tainly a difference, but is it reasonable to assume that the fate of 
real things is bound up with these fluctuations in our perception 
of them? And yet, if the table we are conscious of is the real 
external table, if we are dealing here with one thing and not with 
two, how can the thing go on existing when we no longer perceive 
it? Can a thing exist and not exist at the same time? Must not 
the thing and the percept be somehow separated, if the one is to 
be taken and the other left? 

The justice of the distinction between our perceptions of things 
and the things themselves becomes clear when we examine with 
care what we mean by the expression " a real thing " ; and at the 
same time it becomes clear that we are not forced to double the 
number of things perceived and banish half of them, the real half, 
to a world unknown and unperceived, a world beyond and outside 
of our experience as a whole. In other words, it becomes clear 
that the psychologist is partly right ; that he has recognized dis- 
tinctions that it is important to recognize, but that he has not 
grasped clearly the whole significance of these distinctions. He 
has distinguished between things and our ideas of things ; but he 
has left incomplete his analysis of the former conception. If he 
will complete it, he will find that he may hold to the distinction 
without on that account being forced to say what is inconsistent, 
or to dogmatize on the nature of entities for the existence of which 
he can furnish no unequivocal proof. 

We may begin our investigation of the elements which enter 
into our conception of a real table by marking the following 
points : — 

1. The real table is evidently more to us than this one 
experience of color-sensations ; a very little reflection is suiflcient 
to establish that. It is quite true that I say, " I see the real table," 
and refer to this experience of colors ; but when I examine my 
thought a little more narrowly, I admit at once that this one 
experience does not constitute for me the table of which I am 
speaking. It would be a monstrosity, a phantom table, no table at 
all, that could be summed up in a single visual experience. It 
could not be seen from a nearer or a farther point, from this angle 



' ( 



What toe Mean hy the External World 101 

or that, under a good light or in semi-obscurity. Moreover, it 
could not be touched, and recognized as hard, smooth, furnished 
with sharp corners and rounded edges, a thing to knock up against, 
to sit upon, to give forth sounds when drummed upon with the 
fingers. AH these elements enter into our conception of a real 
table, and although at any given moment some one experience may 
be more prominently in mind than the others, these others cannot 
be wholly lacking, or we are not thinking of a table at all. Thus 
tables, as they enter into our experience, are very complex things. 
Single experiences of sight or of touch may enter into these com- 
plexes, and help to make them what they are ; but they cannot be 
regarded as strictly identical with the wholes of which they are 
mere elements. 

2. It should be observed, furthermore, that when I say, " I see 
the table," the various elements which constitute the conception 
are not all present in consciousness in the same way. One experi- 
ence of color presents itself in consciousness with a certain vivid- 
ness; it is, as we say, in the sense. But all the other experiences 
of color which enter into the conception must be present, not in 
the sense but in imagination. It is not possible for me to see all 
around a table at once, or to view it from different distances simul- 
taneously. And if I merely look at the table, and do not touch 
it, all those experiences of touch w^hich enter into the conception, 
and which supplement the experiences of sight, must be present, in 
so far as they are present, as imaginary elements, and not as sensa- 
tions. So it may be with any other experiences which contribute 
their quota to my notion of a real table. I may see a real table 
before me, and recognize on reflection that I actually see very little 
indeed, and that vastly the greater part of the total content for 
which the word stands is furnished by the imagination, not found 
in the sense. 

3. It is possible to go even a step farther than this. We all 
believe in the existence of real tables at which we do not happen 
to be looking at any given moment. If this one before me is 
carried into the next room, I do not, on that account, cease to 
believe that it continues to exist. It is still for me a real table, 
but a real table for the time being unperceived. When I am 
thinking of it, every element in my thought is drawn from the 
region of imagination. It is, then, as it appears, possible for a real 
table to exist without being perceived at all ; it is merely conceived^ 



102 The External World 

thought about, constructed in the imagination. It has its whole 
being in a region which we are accustomed to contrast with the 
real world of things, and to which we deny reality of the same 
kind as that which we attribute to these. If this be so, how can 
that which is in consciousness be the real thing ? Have we 
not come back to something very like the standpoint of the 
psychologist ? 

4. The answer to this question we may defer for a few 
moments. It is important here to recognize that we do not regard 
an imaginary table, as such, as a real one. It is not enough to 
draw upon our past experience of tables, to put together such and 
such elements, construct for ourselves in thought a table of a given 
size and color and marked by certain arbitrarily chosen char- 
acteristics, and then give it an unperceived existence in this locality 
or that. 

I do not believe the table in the next room to exist merely 
because the conception of it is in my mind. It is not the part of 
good sense to embrace this belief for no better reason. I believe 
that the table in the next room exists, either because I saw it 
carried in there out of this room, or because some one else has 
seen it and has told me so ; or because, by some other method — 
perhaps a very indirect method indeed — I am enabled to connect 
the thought of the table with experiences of the class to which 
sensations belong, and to recognize that it may be regarded as a 
representative of a sensational content and, under appropriate 
circumstances, may even be replaced by such. 

My ultimate reference is always to sensation ; to sensations 
which have been experienced, or to sensations which may be 
experienced. I may lay my hand on the table before me and 
substitute for the idea of hardness the corresponding sensa- 
tion. If I am asked to prove that there is a table in the next 
room, I may either sit still and show from experiences had in 
the past that this particular conception must be placed among 
those which are legitimately regarded as representative of sense 
presentations ; or I may, instead, rise and open the door, thus sub- 
stituting a perception, an actual experience of color, for the thought 
of such. This reference to sense, implicit in all our affirmations 
of the reality of things, has been so often pointed out, that it may 
seem scarcely necessary to emphasize it. It is admitted by men of 
widely different schools of thought. 



What we Mean hy the External World 103 

But what, after all, is meant by a reference to sensation ? How 
can a sensation be recognized as such ? 

This problem has been touched upon in an earlier chapter.^ It 
was there pointed out that sensations, the class of experiences 
which Hume called impressions, have as a class a degree of vivid- 
ness which serves to mark them out roughly from the class of 
experiences called ideas. But it was remarked, at the same time, 
that this difference in vividness is not always present to serve 
as a criterion, and that, consequently, some other mark must be 
sought, if we are to feel safe in relegating this experience or that 
to the one class or to the other. Ideas may in certain cases be 
very vivid and insistent; sensations may be extremely dim and 
shadowy. A man seen in a dim light is not to be regarded as less 
real than an actor in a dream, though the latter may stand out very 
strikingly on the background of his unreal surroundings. 

There must, then, be some other final court of appeal if the 
claims of sensations and ideas are to be determined with anything 
like an approach to justice. Such a court the psychologist tries 
to furnish us in distinguishing between mental experiences which 
are to be regarded as the result of " peripheral stimulation," that 
is, those which arise when the outworks, so to speak, of our nervous 
system are thrown into a state of activity ; and mental experiences 
which correspond to an independent activity of the " central " 
nervous system, those, in other words, which represent brain action 
which is not a direct response to a message conducted along a 
sensory nerve. 

This distinction appears at first glance to be a convenient one. 
Perhaps it will really be a very convenient one for some purposes, 
when we possess a more accurate knowledge than we now do of 
what takes place in the peripheral nervous system and in the 
central. But it must not be overlooked that the man who offers 
us this distinction as the criterion for deciding what experi- 
ences are sensations and what are ideas has placed himself upon 
the psychological standpoint, and has assumed that, in a certain 
field at least, he already has the knowledge to which his criterion 
is to help him. How does he know that the body, of whose central 
and peripheral nervous systems he discourses, is not an imaginary 
thing, a persistent hallucination ? How can he prove his experi- 
ences of the body, which are to form the touchstone for testing 

1 Chapter IV. 



104 The External World 

other experiences, to be of the class called sensational ? If he 
simply assumes them to be such — as he does — and then uses 
them as the test of other experiences, is he not guessing at half 
the distance to the sun, and then multiplying by two, to discover 
how far away the sun really is ? 

The procedure of the psychologist is not, however, as bad as it 
looks when set forth in this way. His criterion cannot be accepted 
as final by the metaphysician, but it may serve a useful purpose 
nevertheless. In advancing it, the psychologist remains upon the 
plane of the common understanding, and assumes that certain 
things may be safely assumed, even if they are not completely 
understood. We have seen that the distinction between our sensa- 
tions and our ideas is one recognized in common life, and that it 
would be extremely inconvenient were these two classes of experi- 
ence easily and frequently confounded.^ There is the broad dis- 
tinction, just mentioned, of a superior vividness, which characterizes 
our sensations as a class. But even where this characteristic is 
lacking, and where a mere inspection of the experience itself would 
leave the mind in doubt as to its proper place, it is possible to apply 
the only ultimate criterion, a recognition of the way in which the 
experience behaves^ of the place among our other experiences which 
it takes and maintains, and thus to decide upon the class to which 
it rightly belongs. 

This criterion is perfectly well recognized in common life, and 
it is the one applied in the more exact investigations which obtain 
in the sciences. It may be very well applied without a clear 
apprehension of its ultimate nature, and yet with a nice sense of 
whether given experiences meet its requirements or do not. In 
other words, it may be applied without being reflected upon. The 
child soon learns to recognize that the green lion which marches 
across the ceiling when the light has been carried off, and he has 
been left to the phantom terrors of a solitary crib, is not exactly 
like the lion which lives in a cage, and can be seen only by paying 
admission. The behavior of this lion is too inconsequent. He is 
real enough to inspire fear, but he is, nevertheless, not exactly 
real. The presence of the light is enough to exorcise him. And 
even the man who has no settled opinions touching the existence 
and nature of ghosts, is apt to think that a ghost capable of being 
photographed is more real a ghost than the one which can at best 

1 Chapter IV. 



What ive Mean hy the External World 105 

only make itself apparent to the terrified rustic at dead of night. 
We have all our lives been judging our experiences, and arranging 
them as a result of that judgment. What we see we try to touch ; 
and what we touch we perhaps try to taste and smell. No one 
approaches mature life without finding himself in a world of things 
pretty well known, and without settled habits of testing things to 
find whether they are real^ that is, whether they belong to that 
orderly class of experiences which have fallen into a regular sys- 
tem, or whether they defy such an arrangement and must be 
relegated to a class of a different kind. 

Hence it does not occur to the plain man to offer proof that 
his body is real. He knows that it is, even if he cannot define 
what he means by the word. He only busies himself with the 
reality of those things which are still in doubt. And the psycholo- 
gist, standing upon the same basis, but desiring more accurate 
knowledge and having forced upon his attention many problems 
which do not fall within the horizon of the plain man, makes more 
of a coil about the reality or the unreality of things, but he 
assumes the reality of his body and of an external world just as 
confidently as does the former. His proposed method of distin- 
guishing sensations from ideas is a convenient expedient for decid- 
ing doubtful cases, but it assumes that the distinction has already been 
drawn. As I have suggested above, it may sometime turn out to 
be a very useful expedient, and we have no right to condemn it 
because the man who uses it remains a psychologist and does not 
become an epistemologist. 

There is, then, but one ultimate method of deciding whether a 
given experience is to be classed as a sensation or not. We must 
discover whether it takes its place among those elements of our 
experience which so connect themselves together as to form what 
we recognize as the system of material things. ^ It has long been 
recognized that there is an orderliness in this system which appears 
to be lacking in our other experiences. 

For example, in my present perception of the table before me, 
I recognize a definite expanse of color, determined as to quantity 
and quality. I can vary this by changing my position or by chang- 

1 1 beg the reader to regard the account of the external world and of sensation 
given in this chapter and in the next one as a provisional account, which should 
be supplemented by what is said in Chapters VIII and IX, and also by what is said 
in Chapters XXIII and XXIV. 



106 The External World 

ing the position of the table. I can cause it to disappear by closing 
my eyes. But I cannot bring about any of these changes unless I 
adopt the appropriate means of effecting the particular result at 
which I am aiming. These changes in my experience follow upon 
certain other changes in my experience in a fixed and orderly way ; 
and I must acquaint myself with this order if I wish to control the 
experiences. 

What I have called ideas, on the other hand, do not take their 
place in this system. Whatever may be the laws which determine 
their appearances and disappearances, they are not the same laws 
which are found in the world of sensations. I can perform all 
sorts of arbitrary operations upon an imaginary table — turn it 
from black to white, increase or diminish its size, change its shape, 
annihilate it and recreate it — pretty much as I please ; I am free 
here as I am not free in dealing with sensations. Moreover, when 
I dismiss an imaginary table from my thought, it really seems to 
be gone, to be annihilated ; while a table that I have once seen and 
no longer see, I am yet forced to regard as holding some sort of 
place in the system in which I have accorded it a place. I may 
still explain certain of my experiences by referring to it, just as if 
I still saw it. Even if it be broken to pieces or destroyed by fire, 
I cannot think, when I have once arisen to the conception of a 
system of real things, that that system is now just what it would 
have been if that table had not held a place in it. The imaginary 
table appears to be mortal, and the table which presents itself to 
the sense seems to enjoy some sort of immortality. 

But here the objection may be raised, and with good show of 
reason, that in the above there is an unwarrantable transition from 
sensations to things. Have we not seen that, when we speak of 
seeing a real thing, there is usually but little in the sense, and that 
by far the greater portion of the elements which we conceive as 
constituting the thing exist, in so far as they exist in our expe- 
rience at all, not in the sense but in the imagination ? Why, then, 
speak of our sensations as connected together into a system and 
constituting an orderly world? Can anything be more irregular 
than the actual sense-experience which we have of things ? 1 see 
my table to-day and I do not see it again until day after to-morrow ; 
on some occasions I see it but do not touch it ; the under side of it 
I happen never to have seen at all. What sort of material is this 
of which to make a real table holding its place in a real world ? 



What we Mean hy the External World 107 

That world appears before the windows of the senses only in fugi- 
tive glimpses, and we may piece these together as we will, but 
they still remain ridiculously inadequate to make such a world as 
we conceive the world to be. Is the life history of a table nothing 
more than a discontinuous series of flashes ? It is clear that we 
cannot take quite literally the statement that our sensations fall 
into an ordered system and constitute what we mean by a world of 
things. 

If, however, we understand the statement aright, there is no 
reason why we should not approve it. It is quite true that our 
sensations do not of themselves constitute our consciousness of a 
world of real things ; this world does not present itself to us 
immediately as a complex sensational content upon which we gaze. 
It is rather a something built up out of the materials furnished by 
sense, supplemented by elements which, while not themselves sen- 
sations, are made to represent such. Sensations, memories of sen- 
sations, and imaginary experiences which are not memories, though 
their elements have no independent source, all enter into its com- 
position. Our sensations, actual and remembered, are separated 
by gaps which must be filled before there emerges the system of 
experiences which we call the world of real things. 

The gradual emergence of such a system in an individual con- 
sciousness is described at length by the psychologist, and is termed 
by him the development of a consciousness of the external world. 
We may take such a description, clear away all reference to the 
psychological assumption of the existence of an external world 
beyond consciousness and not composed of consciousness-elements, 
and, taking our stand upon ground proper to the metaphysician, 
see in it a description of the elements which enter into our concep- 
tion of an external world when we speak of such without reference 
to this consciousness or that. It is merely a question of an 
analysis of conceptions ; the psychologist asks himself just what 
he means when he conceives of this man or that as being conscious 
of the external world ; the metaphysician asks himself just what 
is meant by the expression " the external world," and sees that he 
can answer this question independently. Still, he can use the 
analysis made by the psychologist ; it may be of no small help to 
him, if he will avoid being misled by the assumptions included in 
the reasoning which he is following. 

He may see clearly — a point of especial importance at this 



108 The External World 

stage of my discussion — that the psychologist lays great stress 
upon the sensational elements in the consciousness of an external 
world, makes them, in fact, the basis and the justification of the 
whole construction. When he reflects upon his own consciousness 
of the world at any moment, he realizes that this is justified. He 
sees that the imaginary constituents of the world of real things 
which he finds in his experience do not take their place in that 
construction as imaginary elements^ but as representative of sensa- 
tional elements. It is their content, so to speak, which belongs to 
the construction, not the content with the added characteristic of 
belonging to the class called imaginary. There is, thus, a sense in 
which we may say that the external world is constituted by the 
sensational elements in our experience. These elements appear 
to belong to it in a way in which other elements do not. 
They constitute it, and elements remembered or imagined merely 
represent it. 

So important is the point here insisted upon that I may be per- 
mitted to delay upon it, even at the risk of a little repetition. I 
am sitting here in my room and I see my table before me. Every- 
one is willing to admit that this particular experience of color is a 
sensation. It appears strange to no one that I should see my desk 
under such circumstances. Beyond my room is a hall, and at the 
end of this a door. I say that I think of the door as there — that 
I imagine it, but do not see it. Both in the case of the desk and 
of the door I believe that I am concerned with real things in a real 
external world, but I unhesitatingly draw a distinction between 
seeing a thing and imagining it. 

The door imagined is not an arbitrary product of my imagina- 
tion ; it is not mere fancy. It has its definite place in my concep- 
tion of the external world. Hence it does not appear to be by any 
means so lawless a thing as a purely imaginary door, and what has 
been said of the distinction between sensational and imaginary 
elements in consciousness seems to be contradicted. Whether it 
appear in my consciousness as imaginary or not, I think of that 
door at the end of the hall as a real door, and I feel that I cannot 
by an act of will change its nature or annihilate it altogether. 
But the contradiction disappears when we bear in mind what has 
just been said above, namely, that the imaginary elements in our 
consciousness of the external world are not imaginary elements 
pure and simple, but are imaginary elements which are regarded 



What we Mean by the External World 109 

as representative of sensational. They must be what they are, for 
their nature is determined by the content which they represent. 
We have here, not sensation, but, as I have expressed it a few 
pages back, a reference to sensation^ and this must be present in all 
our affirmations of the reality of things. 

That even these imaginary elements, which help to fill out our 
conception of the external world, do not themselves fall directly 
into the system of real things, we recognize when we call them 
imaginary. As I have said, it appears strange to no one that, 
sitting here, I should see my table and only imagine that door. 
What does this mean ? It means that the table as seen, this par- 
ticular visual sensation, is actually in the setting in which things 
must be if they are to constitute elements in the external world. 
The door which I imagine is not in such a setting. Were I stand- 
ing in the hall, i.e, were the setting other than it now is, I would 
see the door. Whether a given experience is or is not in the 
setting which guarantees it a sensation, men may know very well, 
as I have indicated, without knowing just how they know it, and 
without giving much conscious thought to the distinction between 
what is real and what is imaginary. We cannot, then, legitimately 
quarrel with the statement that sensations constitute the external 
world of things, and that the imaginary elements in our conception 
of such a world are merely representative of sensations. 

Thus we see that by the expression " the external world " we 
mean a construct in consciousness, and a construct in consciousness 
of a peculiar kind. We do not mean precisely what we do when 
we use such a phrase as " my consciousness of the external world 
at this time or at that." We have seen that, when we think of 
certain consciousness-contents as having their place in the con- 
struct which we call the external world, we abstract from the degree 
of vividness with which they may happen to appear in conscious- 
ness. Sensations are not necessarily vivid, and provided that we 
have some sort of proof that a certain experience belongs to this 
class, we do not refuse to accord it a place in the system of real 
things merely because it does not stand out prominently in con- 
sciousness. Such differences we describe as differences in our 
perception of things, not as differences in the reality of things. 
Of course, when one has arrived at the notion of an orderly system 
of things, and has learned to account for this or that peculiarity in 
one's experience by a reference to other parts of the system, one 



110 The External World 

does not regard a difference in the vividness with which experiences 
present themselves as something inexplicable and independent of 
the system as a whole. Nevertheless, one recognizes that what we 
call the reality of a thing has little to do with the vividness with 
which it presents itself in consciousness. 

We have also seen that what I call " my consciousness of an 
external world " is a complex of sensational and imaginary elements, 
and yet we do not regard real things as composed of elements of the 
two classes. 

So little does it appear to be necessary to mark this distinction 
when one is discussing real things, that most persons experience 
an emotion of surprise when it is pointed out to them that their 
consciousness of things is largely made up of imaginary elements. 
They are interested in things^ not in their percepts as percepts ; 
and when we are concerned with things, the imaginary elements in 
our percept are representative of sensational ; they are important 
to us primarily on account of the function which they perform, and 
we pay no attention to the fact that they are in themselves to be 
differentiated from sensations. The qualities of things, as we call 
such elements of our experience as are conceived to have a place 
in the system under discussion, are not conceived as existing now 
in the sense and now in the imagination ; they are simply regarded 
as forming a constituent part of that system and as sharing its 
reality. 

This distinction between " the external world " and " my con- 
sciousness of the external world " — a distinction drawn equally by 
the plain man, the man of science, and the metaphysician — 
becomes clearer when we see in it an instance of the very common 
distinction between that which is symbolized or represented and 
the symbol which stands for the former. 

This distinction has been discussed at length in Chapter III, 
and what has there been said is of importance to a clear under- 
standing of the doctrine of the external world and our conscious- 
ness of it. What we call " a thing " is a complex construction, 
and we all believe that things are or may be much more comj)lex 
than the elements regarded as belonging to them that we actually 
find in our experience — more complex, in other words, than that 
of which we are intuitively conscious. 

When, for instance, T look at my table, I realize that even when 
I supplement the color-sensations which I experience by other 



What ive Mean hy the External World 111 

color-sensations remembered or imagined, and by similar materials 
drawn from the province of the other senses, yet all the elements 
that are actually in my consciousness do not exhaust the sum total 
of the experiences which the words " my table " may be made to 
cover. I distinguish between all that is in my thought, and all 
that belongs to the thing. I regard the thing as more complex 
than my representation of it. And when I have to do, not with 
a single real thing like a table, but with the system of real things 
as a whole — when I talk about the external world — I am quite 
ready to admit, if the matter be brought to my attention, that what 
is in my consciousness is a very inadequate representation of the 
external world. The external world I conceive to be something 
indefinitely richer and more complex. 

I have said that this distinction between our experiences and 
the external things for which they are conceived to stand is by no 
means peculiar to the metaphysician. He merely tries to make 
clear what the distinction is, and to avoid the inconsistency into 
which others seem to fall. The plain man and the psychologist 
regard the real things for which our experiences stand as existing 
wholly outside of consciousness and as separated by an impassable 
gulf from our experiences as a whole. At the same time they 
tacitly assume that we directly perceive these same real things 
and are not cut off from them at all. The impossibility of accept- 
ing their doctrine as final has been pointed out, and it is not neces- 
sary to repeat what has been said. The metaphysician must retain 
the distinction which they have recognized, but he must so define 
it as to avoid self-contradiction. 

It is not possible at this stage in my discussion to exhibit the 
full significance of such expressions as " my consciousness " and 
" the consciousness of another man " ; but it is at least possible to 
recognize that the distinction between a thing as it is actually 
found in my experience and a thing as it is conceived to be in its 
own nature, becomes a comprehensible and by no means an absurd 
distinction when it is perceived to be a distinction between symbol 
and that which is symbolized. In the one case we are concerned 
with a given content in consciousness in itself considered, and in 
the other with a content in consciousness regarded as representative 
of some other complex of consciousness-elements. It is perfectly 
just to draw a distinction between symbol and thing symbolized, 
but in drawing this distinction we must not grow incoherent or 



112 The External World 

unintelligible. We must remember what is meant by a symbol, 
and wliat is the true nature of symbolic knowledge. Within the 
limits of experience — within consciousness, in other words — one 
complex may symbolize or represent another ; but it is inconceiv- 
able that any experience should symbolize a something wholly 
beyond experience, a something so completely cut off from experi- 
ence as the external world is sometimes conceived to be. 

The external world of real things is, thus, a construct in con- 
sciousness. It is a system of elements related to each other in 
certain fixed ways. When we speak of this or that man as being 
conscious of this or that aspect of it, we are distinguishing between 
a more or less satisfactory representative of the system, and the 
system itself. That we can make this distinction does not imply 
that we have in mind an intuitive consciousness of both the repre- 
sentative in question and the system represented by it, and that 
we place them in thought side by side. Our procedure is just what 
it is in other cases in which we distinguish between the symbol 
and that which it stands for. 

We may regard one man as having a very inadequate notion of 
what is meant by a million units, and another as having a truer 
conception of that number, but we never dream of the latter as 
being intuitively conscious of a million as he may be of two or 
three individuals, nor do we arrogate to ourselves the power of thus 
knowing so large a number. And yet we can distinguish between 
the million, in itself considered, and the representative of it which 
is actually present in the consciousness of any individual at any 
moment. The latter is just this particular experience, definitely 
limited, and containing no overwhelming number of constituent 
elements ; the former is to us rather a way of looking at certain 
things than an individual thing, rather a formula than a fact, rather 
a rule for dealing with experiences than a given experience. It is 
an ideal, a construction which obtains its significance ultimately 
from that intuitive consciousness which we have of small numbers, 
and its justification from the fact that by means of it and other 
similar conceptions we take our departure from and return to such 
intuitive experiences in an orderly way, predicting and verifying 
our experiences as we could not without the aid of these concep- 
tions. 

When we are concerned, not with the elements we actually 
have in mind when we speak of a million, but with the conception 



What we Mean hy the External World 113 

of a million in itself considered, we abstract from the fact that the 
units of which it is assumed to be composed are not present in con- 
sciousness as are the units which compose the number two, and we 
treat our million as though it were composed of the same materials. 
For the purposes of an arithmetical calculation, it is of no conse- 
quence whether our consciousness of the group of units with which 
we are dealing be intuitive or symbolic. If we reason well, the 
results at which we ultimately arrive are the same. And it is not 
nonsense for us to say that it is conceivable that to a consciousness 
of a different nature from our own a million units might be intui- 
tively present, might be recognized clearly and distinctly, as small 
groups of two or three units present themselves to us. We cannot 
picture such a state of affairs, but we can tldnk it ; that is, we can 
make a mental construction which will fairly represent it ; we can 
represent it to ourselves symbolically. We mean something when 
we say it, and our conviction that we do so cannot be shaken even 
by the lack of clearness in the metaphysician's attempt at an ex- 
position of what we mean. 

So it is with our conception of the external world. We may 
admit that some frame a better notion of it than others, and that 
we all have something actually in mind, when w^e speak of it, which 
but very imperfectly represents its indefinite complexity. Never- 
theless, even in thus speaking, we distinguish in some sort between 
the external world as it is and the ideas of it which this or that 
man may happen to cherish. We distinguish between the repre- 
sentatives of it in individual minds, and the ideal system of which 
they are supposed to be representative. As in the former instance, 
there is nothing to prevent us from conceiving of a consciousness 
in which vastly more of the real world is intuitively present than 
is the case with us. 

It is thus quite possible for the metaphysician to hold to the 
common psychological distinction between the conception of an 
external world which is built up in this mind or in that, and 
the original which this conception is supposed imperfectly to repre- 
sent. But it is necessary to bear in mind that it is quite impossible 
for the psychologist to recognize that his conception of the exter- 
nal world is but an indifferent representative of the external world 
itself, if this world be a something quite outside of consciousness. 
No man can compare two things, one of which in no way enters 
into his experience. He who is wholly shut up to his copy of 



114 The External World 

a world cannot even know that it is a copy, and of course he can- 
not know that it is an imperfect copy. He must, in some sense of 
the word be conscious of both, if he is to mark the distinction 
between copy and original. But in what sense? For it seems 
pertinent, if he be conscious of both, to ask, of what use is the 
copy? and why if it exist at all, need it be imperfect? The diffi- 
cult}^ disappears when we realize that we are not dealing with 
original and copy in the sense in which the psychologist is tempted 
to believe that we are ; but that we are dealing with the distinction 
between symbol and thing symbolized. Evidently there is a sense 
in which both must exist in consciousness, for were there not, it 
would be impossible for the symbol to be recognized as a symbol. 
It is only when we are representing the distinction to ourselves 
diagram matically that we have the right to place the two side by 
side as though they were numerically distinct in all their elements. 
Original and copy are here distinguishably different ; nevertheless, 
we find that the one experience may have its place in the copy, and 
at the same time may form a part of that system of things which 
we call the real world. 



CHAPTER VII 

SENSATIONS AND "THINGS" 

We may sum up the conclusions so far arrived at as follows : 

(1) the real external world is a complex of consciousness-elements ; 

(2) when we speak of our consciousness of it, we recognize that 
what we actually have in mind is a compound of sensational and 
of imaginary elements, the latter largely predominating ; (3) but 
we do not think of imaginary elements, as such, as actually enter- 
ing into the composition of the real world — we see that the only 
elements which really fit into the system are the sensational ele- 
ments; (4) it seems to follow that the real world which we are 
discussing is a complex of sensational elements and of none other. 

Here there appears to stare us in the face something very like 
a contradiction, an antinomy. Have we not concluded that the 
external world cannot be external in such a sense as to be wholly 
beyond consciousness, since in that case it could mean to us nothing 
at all? On the other hand, has it not been pointed out that the 
actual experiences we have of things, our sensations, are something 
very scrappy and chaotic until they are supplemented by imaginary 
elements and built, together with them, into a single system ? If 
this system is not the real world, where is this world ? It cannot 
be out of consciousness ; and it does not seem to be in conscious- 
ness, for our consciousness of it is just this combination of sen- 
sory and imaginary elements which we have discovered that the 
real world cannot be. It appears, thus, that the sensational ele- 
ments which are found in consciousness will not suffice to make a 
world, and that the only things we have at hand, with which to 
supplement them, are incapable of entering into its composition. 

But the reader has probably seen at once that this antinomy is 
only an apparent one, and that what has been said, in the last 
chapter, of the distinction between symbol and thing symbolized, 
representative and that for which it stands, is sufficient to conjure 
it away. When we consider our consciousness of the external 

115 



116 The External World 

world, when we confine our attention to the symbol, we perceive, 
of course, that the elements composing it are partly real and partly 
imaginary. But the symbol, in itself considered, is not the external 
world. It is a representative of it and no more. 

By the external world we .mean that for which the symbol 
stands, the ideal system of experiences of which the symbol is 
admitted to be an inadequate representative. In thinking of this we 
are abstracting from the inadequacy of the symbol. In saying 
that this is constituted of sensational elements we are simply recog- 
nizing the fact that certain elements in the symbol fall directly 
into place in this system and that others do not, and also the fact 
that every element which is conceived as entering into it must 
enter into it in the way in which these are perceived to. In the 
real world there is no distinction between sensory and imaginary. 
Such distinctions have to do with the symbol, not with the system 
of experiences for which it stands. They must be abstracted from 
when we decide to occupy ourselves with the latter. 

If, however, we abstract from such distinctions, what right have 
we to go on using the word "sensation"? With what color of justice 
can we say that the system of real things is composed of sensa- 
tional elements ? Here, at least, we have a sound and solid ob- 
jection. I must frankly admit that these words contain a psycho- 
logical reference which should be abstracted from if we intend to 
turn away from the symbol and consider only that for which it 
stands. When we call a given experience a sensation, we do not 
merely think of it as having its place in the system of experiences 
which we call the real world. We mean something more than 
this. We think of it as having a certain kind of existence in a 
given consciousness, as being different from other elements in that 
consciousness. In other words, when we speak thus, we think, not 
merely of the real world, but of some one as perceiving that world. 
These two thoughts are not identical, and they should not be con- 
founded. Why, then, use expressions which appear to be mis- 
leading? 

To this question I must reply as follows : — 

1. I use these expressions because I can find nothing better. 
Language was not framed to mark those distinctions which inter- 
est the few who devote themselves to reflective thought, and which 
pass unnoticed by the plain man. If, instead of using the expres- 
sion " sensational elements," I used the expression " elements of 



Sensations and " Things " 117 

things," I should probably set my readers thinking about atoms or 
molecules, or something else about which I do not in the least wish 
them to think in this connection. Moreover, the statement that 
the world of real things is made up of " elements of things " ap- 
pears tautological and unfruitful. It carries with it no suggestion 
of how one is to get at these elements and examine them one by 
one. 

2. The expression "sensational elements," faulty as it is, is 
not without its advantages. For one thing, it suggests, and 
rightly suggests, that, when we are discussing the nature and 
elements of the external world, we are, in the last analysis, deal- 
ing with consciousness, with experience, and not with an incom- 
prehensible something beyond it. 

3. The expression furnishes us, furthermore, with a sugges- 
tion of the way in which experiences are to be analyzed. Both the 
plain man and the psychologist are familiar with a classification of 
the sensations, and, hence, with what has been called the " meta- 
physical division" of things. There is no reason why the meta- 
physician should not make use of the excellent work which has 
been done by the psychologist, and turn it to his purposes. All 
the elements which the latter succeeds in discovering in any ex- 
perienced content are there for the former as well ; and the fact 
that one man is studying them as partial constituents of a world 
of real things and another as experiences in a given consciousness, 
does not prevent their being just what they are — a complex of 
such and such elements in consciousness. 

4. Finally, the expression "sensational elements" does bring 
in, after a fashion, the notion of the external world with which we 
are concerned. The psychologist refers sensations to the outer 
world, and he distinguishes between sensations and the copies of 
sensational elements which are furnished by memory and imagina- 
tion. To him the external world as it is reflected in sensation is 
as immediately known as the external world can he. It is upon 
sensation that he bases the whole construction which he calls the 
idea of the external world in a given consciousness. Imaginary 
elements enter into it only as representative of sensations. This 
characteristic of sensations, namely, their capability of entering 
directly -into this construction, the metaphysician may lay hold of, 
even while he abstracts from other suggestions which the word 
" sensation " has for the psychologist. What the latter regards as 



118 The External World 

constitutive of the external world as known, the former may regard 
as constitutive of the external world, abstracting from the relation 
of knowledge as it is presented in the psychological doctrine of 
representative perception, and passing from symbol to thing 
signified. 

These considerations appear to justify the statement that the 
system of real things is composed of sensational elements. It is to 
be regretted that there seems to be no better form of expression for 
the truth here indicated, and the reader is expressly warned against 
the psychological associations which cling to the words. The 
sense in which they are meant to be used is explained in the pre- 
ceding pages, and I hope that no other sense will be read into 
them. 

There was a time when the philosopher spoke of reality as 
though it were a measurable something in things, and as though 
it could be present in this or that thing in varying quantities. 
God was the " ens realissimum,'" and finite things possessed reality 
in a minor degree. The search for the causes of given effects was 
guided by such maxims as that a cause must contain at least as 
much reality as is to be found in the effect which is referred to it. 

For example, Descartes argues that, since he found in his mind 
the idea of God, God must exist as the cause of that idea, for the 
idea in question contained too great a quantity of reality to be 
referred to any lesser cause, and it seemed self-evident that the 
greater could not come from the less nor the more perfect from 
the less perfect. The same error lies at the root of the quibble 
that finds God's " existence " (which here means real existence) to 
be contained in His '' essence." The existence is here treated as 
part of the total content — a something which may in general be 
added to or taken away from the other determinations of a thing, 
but which is in this case discovered to be so bound up with the 
other determinations that it cannot be so taken away. 

We rarely meet, at the present day, with arguments exactly like 
this, yet we often meet with arguments in which a misconception 
of the same general nature is present. We are exhorted to avoid 
"phenomenalism," to hold on to "reality"; and we are conjured 
not to forget that this thing or that — usually the ego — is not a 
mere bundle of states or activities, but is a "real thing." But 
what is a " real thing "? 

The expression as we find it used usually sugpfests thnt the 



Sensations and '^Things'' 119 

writer admits to be real only the substance or substratum, itself 
unperceived, which was once universal^, and is still very 
commonly, supposed to underlie the qualities of things. But 
even those writers who expressly repudiate this hypothetical 
entity may go on using the phrase very much as do those who still 
cling to it. It is plain that, whatever else they may have in mind 
when they employ it, they at least have in mind the notion that a 
" real thing " somehow differs in content from other things in our 
experience. They believe that, in itself considered^ it means more. 
It is sometimes extremely difficult to gather from their pages just 
what they do mean by a real thing and its reality ; but they evi- 
dently regard reality as a something of the highest importance, 
and exhibit no little nervousness lest it should for some reason be 
allowed to slip away. 

I hope it has been made clear in the preceding chapter that 
reality or real existence is not a something added to the content 
of things. I hope, furthermore, that it has been made plain that 
it is not a something of such a nature that it must forever lurk in 
obscurity — a something to be named from time to time with 
respect, and yet never to be described. The reader has probably 
already remarked the fact that the word " existence " is ambigu- 
ous. It may be used (1) to cover any content of consciousness 
intuitively present, imaginary as well as real ; and (2) it may alone, 
or modified by the adjective " real," be used to discriminate between 
consciousness-contents. Thus, we often say that this thing or that 
does not exist, but it is a mere creature of the imagination. 

It is with the second sense of the word " existence " that we 
are concerned when we speak of the existence of external things. 
When we call a thing real, or say that it really exists, we mean 
that it takes its place in the system of experiences which has been 
discussed at such length in the preceding chapter. This is the 
sole ultimate criterion of its reality; indeed, this is its reality. 
The reality is not in any sense a part of its content ; it is its rela- 
tion to other experiences. This should be sufficiently clear to 
any one who will reflect upon our invariable method of proving 
the reality of anything. As we have seen, we try to discover how 
the thing behaves, where it belongs. We never dream of investi- 
gating whether it has a " substratum " underlying it, or of looking 
for the " reality " as a constituent in it. When we have discov- 
ered that this thing, this experience or complex of experiences, 



120 The External World 

takes its place in the orderly and coherent system of experiences 
which we contrast with mere imaginings, we call it a real thing. 
Its reality means to us this, and nothing more. 

But here it is very necessar}^ to bear in mind the warning 
against misunderstanding the statement that the external world is 
composed of sensational elements. It may be argued that, if the 
real world is composed of sensational elements, it can only have 
an actual existence in so far as it is realized in some particular 
consciousness. In other words, what we have called the symbol, 
the individual mind's representative of the external world, is all 
that can actually exist. That for which the symbol stands, the 
external world in itself considered, can only be regarded as exist- 
ing " potentially " ; that is, it can only be regarded as capable of 
being realized to a greater or less extent in this consciousness or in 
that. It is a possibility, not an actuality. Can there be sensations 
at large ? Sensations which do not form part of some particular 
consciousness ? The world, then, in so far as it actually exists, 
must, if it be composed of sensational elements, exist in some indi- 
vidual consciousness or consciousnesses. And in so far as the 
world exists "potentially" it cannot really be said to exist at all. 
To say that it exists " potentially " is equivalent to saying that it 
will exist or may exist, not to saying that it exists. Does it not 
seem to follow that the doctrine that the real world is composed 
of sensational eleipents necessitates the inference that this world 
has no real existence except in so far as it happens to be perceived 
by some one ? in other words, in so far as it exists intuitively in 
some consciousness ? 

In all this there is evident the influence of the misapprehension 
against which the above warning was directed. It is a misappre- 
hension which makes very easy the confusion of the two senses of 
the word " existence," and the consequent denial of existence to 
the external world. If there is one source of error in philoso])hical 
reasonings more constant and insistent than any other, it is the 
fatal tendency to abstract from this or that and then go on tliink- 
ing and speaking as though one had not thus abstracted. In the 
present instance we pass from symbol to thing symbolized, from 
the individual's consciousness of the world to the world itself. 
We abstract from the limitations of the symbol. We discover 
that the word "existence" is ambiguous, and that it has a special 
meaning when we apply it to things in the real world. Then we 



Sensations and ^'Things'' 121 

straightway forget what that meaning is, and insist that things in 
the real world must have existence, not in the second sense, but 
in the first, if they are to have any existence at all. Perhaps, in a 
fit of generosity, we allow them that dubious sort of existence we 
call potential, which is not existence, but a prophecy of such. No 
wonder the real world comes to seem unreal to those who treat it 
in this fashion. We have returned from the thing symbolized to 
the symbol, and reassumed the limitations we had transcended by 
abstraction. The real world is then regarded, either as having no 
existence save as it breaks out sporadically in this or that conscious- 
ness, like a passing cutaneous eruption, or as having an existence 
that only a philosopher can distinguish from actual non-existence, 
the existence called potential. 

In any case the real world loses. It must lose, because when 
we fall into this confusion, we deny distinctions which exist and 
have importance both in common thought and in science. We 
all recognize that it is one thing to think of this man or that 
as perceiving the real world, and another thing to think of the 
real world itself. It is quite true that the man who remains 
upon the plane of the common understanding misconceives this 
distinction, when he undertakes to make it clear to himself. He 
regards the real world as a something quite outside of conscious- 
ness, not composed of consciousness-elements, and cut off com- 
pletely from direct inspection. But although he misconceives 
the distinction, he is quite right in drawing it, and insisting upon 
its importance. It is one of no little moment both to common 
thought and to science. 

Moreover, we not only distinguish between the real world 
and this or that perception of it, but we all believe that the real 
world exists actually even when we do not happen to perceive 
it, and that it stretches beyond the limits of our perception. We 
believe that the table in the next room really exists. We do 
not think of it as existing potentially, as a mere prophecy or 
promise of existence. We believe that it exists now. And in 
this we are right. It exists now in the only sense of the word 
" exist " applicable to real things as real. It has its place in the 
system of experiences which make up the real world. 

But how can anj^thing have its place in a system of expe- 
riences, when it is not actually experienced? How can it exist 
actually when it is not intuitively present in any consciousness? 



122 The External World 

The objection seems plausible, but it is the identical objection 
that I have been combating all along. The objection assumes 
that the word " existence " has but one meaning, and that if 
things do not exist in the first sense of the word they do not 
exist at all. And yet it is quite clear, to one who will examine 
the actual uses of the word, that it is constantly used in a double 
sense. The distinction recognized by the metaphysician is not his 
own creation. He merely makes explicit what is implicit in the 
thought of others. He endeavors to point out what "real 
existence " must mean, dimly and vaguely, even to the man who, 
unaccustomed to reflective analysis, is at first inclined to repudi- 
ate with energy his explanation of its meaning. A thing can 
have its place in a system of experiences without on that ac- 
count existing intuitively in consciousness. One who denies this 
wipes out the distinction between symbol and that which is 
symbolized ; he denies the possibility of symbolic knowledge in 
toto. Surely it is a rash man who will undertake to do this. 

It is worth while to delay for a moment over the distinction 
between actual existence and potential. It has been stated that it 
is not identical with the distinction between the intuitive existence 
in consciousness of the percept and the real existence of those 
experiences which we conceive as constituting the world of things. 
This becomes clear when we realize that we may distinguish between 
actual and potential existence within either of these classes. We 
may call experiences now intuitively present in consciousness 
actual ; and we may call those which we expect to be thus con- 
scious of, or may be thus conscious of, potential. Similarly, we 
may call an unperceived oak tree actually existent, and may call 
the oak tree which will spring from an actual acorn, potentially 
existent. In both instances, potential existence is a prophecy 
or promise of actuality. It is in each case, be it remarked, a 
prophecy of actuality of the appropriate kind : here, a promise of 
a perception ; there, a promise of the real existence appropriate to 
those things that belong to the real world. It is a manifest injus- 
tice to real things as a whole to ascribe to them only a potential 
existence, when in fact some of them exist actually, and those of 
them which exist potentially are not regarded as existing now at 
all. Such a use of language gratuitously discredits real things 
and makes them seem unreal. 

It should be remarked, furthermore — and this consideration 



Sensations and ''Things'' 123 

should make, if possible, still clearer the justice of the position 
taken just above — it should be remarked, that there is nothing 
to prevent the same experience from having existence in both the 
first and the second senses of the word at the same time. Certain 
of the elements of the table now before me exist in the first sense 
of the word. That is to say, I am now intuitively conscious of 
them. But I recognize this experience as a percept, and I see 
that the sensational elements which it contains belong to the real 
world. In other words, the table exists in sense second, as well 
as in sense first. It has both kinds of actuality at once, and is 
in no sense potential. But an experience need not have both 
kinds of actuality to be really existent. The table in the other 
room, the one which I do not perceive, exists at this moment just 
as really as the one before me. The difference between that 
table and this is a significant difference when we are dealing with 
perceptions ; it is, however, a difference abstracted from when we 
are concerned with real things. It as little enters into the ques- 
tion of their reality as does the size of a triangle into the question 
of the relations between the angles and its sides. 

It will have been observed that the doctrine of the nature of 
the external world set forth in the last chapter and in this one 
suggests the doctrine which has been held with various modifica- 
tions by three philosophers very familiar to English readers, the 
philosophers Berkeley, Hume, and Stuart Mill. At the same time 
it will have been recognized by those who read with discrimination 
the writings of these men, that all three of them fall into what has 
been above treated as an error. 

They all hold more or less to the traditional psychological 
standpoint even while they criticise it; and, hence, the real world, 
when it has passed through their hands, does not seem to be such a 
very real world after all. The psychologist distinguishes between 
his consciousness of the real world and a real world which he 
assumes to lie beyond it. The representative of such a world in 
his consciousness he regards as a limited thing, which very imper- 
fectly mirrors the world as it really is. Now, the philosopher who 
sees the inconsistency of the psychologist's position, the assumption 
of a world beyond our experience and quite cut off from it, and who 
is moved by this insight to reject such a world, seems to be robbed 
of his real world altogether unless he can find somewhere and some- 
how in experience a real world which may take the place of the one 



124 The External World 

which has been lost. If he simply throws the external world away 
as a gratuitous fiction, and draws no distinction between his ideas 
of things and the things themselves, he appears to be walking in a 
vain show, to be fed by mere appearances, to be unable to reach 
reality at all. 

No wonder that his words excite opposition and sometimes even 
irritation. When he attempts to persuade us of the truth of his 
doctrine, we feel that he is a would-be robber. We are accus- 
tomed to recognizing a distinction between ideas and things, and 
even when we cannot follow with complete comprehension the 
turns of a writer's thought, we refuse to have him palm off upon 
us as a satisfactory conclusion to his reflections upon the world, the 
statement that matter does not exist, or that the whole system of 
things is nothing but a concatenation of ideas. Of course, the 
popular objection to a philosopher's positions may, in some cases, 
be due to a mere misunderstanding of his words, or to a start of 
surprise at the novelty of his statements. But in other cases it 
may be justified. It may be that, in his endeavor to arrive at a 
clearer comprehension of things, the philosopher has been misled 
into denying distinctions which really obtain and are of significance 
in common thought and in science. 

This charge may not unjustly be brought against the three phi- 
losophers above mentioned. That the real world does not seem very 
real to one who reads them is not entirely due to misconception on 
the part of the reader. They do overlook distinctions which are of no- 
slight importance, and the world they offer us is not the real world 
to which we are accustomed, merely set in a clear light. It is 
something else, which we feel cannot properly be made to take its 
place. 

Those who are familiar with the " Principles of Human Knowl- 
edge" cannot fall into the vulgar error of believing that the 
Berkeleyan Idealism wholly obliterates the distinction between 
real things and imaginary. It is true that Berkeley calls all alik& 
"ideas," and the use of this word is in itself enough to inspire 
distrust in a majority of those who follow his discussions ; but he 
states explicitly that, by what he calls " ideas of sense," he means 
nothing more nor less than things — things as they enter into our 
experience, things perceived. He is careful to point out that his 
polemic against a material world is a polemic against something 
which never has been perceived by any one, and which cannot be- 



Sensations and "Things'' 125 

proved to exist by any legitimate inference from what is experi- 
enced. It is, in substance, a polemic against the inconsistent real 
world of the psychologist who remains upon the psychological 
standpoint, and accepts it as final — an argument to show that the 
man in the cell ^ must really have some ground for asserting that 
things exist, and must mean something when he speaks of the man- 
ner of their existence, or his assertions will become mere gibberish. 

Thus the world which Berkeley means to reject is a hypotheti- 
cal world, beyond consciousness in the broad sense of that word. 
He has no intention of denying the existence of real things as 
they are revealed in our experience ; indeed, he points out with 
admirable clearness the criterion by which real things are to be 
recognized as such. He emphasizes, as he should, the truth that 
the orderly character of certain of our experiences puts them into 
a class by themselves, and he calls the regular ways in which they 
are connected together and precede and follow one another " laws 
of nature." Moreover, notwithstanding his repeated denials that 
it is possible for things to exist unperceived, he recognizes with 
some clearness the fact that the word " exist " is used in two senses, 
and remarks the fact that, in one of these senses, it is applicable to 
things unperceived : " The table I write on I say exists ; that is, I 
see and feel it ; and if I were out of my study I should say it 
existed — meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might per- 
ceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it." ^ 

Here we have the materials for a satisfactory correction, 
through reflective analysis, of the inconsistency which attaches to 
the psychological doctrine of ideas and things — we have a recog- 
nition of the fact that the attempt to transcend consciousness, in 
the broad sense of that word, is futile, and results in meaningless 
statements ; of the fact that, within consciousness, we can find a 
world of things ; and of the fact that we can distinguish between 
the presence in consciousness of a perception and the existence of 
a thing. We have here, I say, the materials for a satisfactory 
restatement, from the point of view of metaphysics, of the psycho- 
logical position. It is, however, manifest that Berkeley was not 
himself able to use these materials as he might have done. The 
distinctions he draws are not always clear to him, and he is conse- 
quently more or less inconsistent. He could not get far enough 

1 See Chapter 11. 

2 " A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," § 3. 



126 The External World 

away from the psychological standpoint to criticise it in a thorough- 
going way. That he never completely left it is evident from the 
following : — 

Although he explains that by ideas of sense he means things, 
he is unable wholly to free himself from the usual psychological 
suggestions of the word "idea." Men commonly think of their 
ideas as in, or in some obscure way connected with, their heads ; 
as being without extension ; as forming no part of the system of 
material things ; and as influencing external things, if at all, only 
indirectly, and through motions that they may set up in the human 
body. They are felt to be made of more unsubstantial stuff than 
enters into the composition of material objects. Now Berkeley 
treats external things, after calling them ideas of sense, somewhat 
as other persons treat ideas in general. That relation between 
occurrences in the external world which we are accustomed to rec- 
ognize as that of cause and effect, he regards as that of sign and 
thing signified. The autumn wind blows, and the dry leaf trem- 
bles and falls. To Berkeley the passing of the wind is not the 
cause of the fall of the leaf. It is but a sign of that occurrence, 
an indication that it is about to take place. The wind does noth- v 
ing at all. " All our ideas, sensations, notions, or the things which'"'^ 
we perceive, by whatsoever names they may be distinguished, are,'' 
he writes, " visibly inactive — there is nothing of power or agency 
included in them. So that one idea or object of thought cannot 
produce or make any alteration in another." ^ Where did our 
philosopher get such a notion of the passivity of ideas ? Evidently 
from the common meaning of the word, the meaning which sharply 
distinguishes between things and the ideas of things, relegating 
them to two distinct classes, in only one of which there obtain 
relations of physical causation. Do we not all know very well 
that the idea of a hammer cannot really drive the idea of a nail 
into the idea of a wall ? As well expect the shadow of a dog to 
rend with shadowy fangs the shadow of a hare. 

Various passages might be cited to show that when Berkeley 
discusses real things, he is unable to strip off the usual associa- 
tions which cluster around the word "idea." It will be enough to 
refer to one more, — the one which contains the amusing sugges- 
tion, brought forward in all seriousness by this earnest soul, that 
the heathen world might be converted from idolatry by the appli- 
1 "A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," § 25. 



Sensations and '' Thing s^^ 127 

cation of the drastic remedy of universal immaterialism. It reads 
thus : " Did men but consider that the sun, moon, and stars, and 
every other object of the senses are only so many sensations in 
their minds, which have no other existence but barely being per- 
ceived, doubtless they would never fall down and worship their 
own ideas^ but rather address their homage to that Eternal, In- 
visible Mind which produces and sustains all things." i But why 
should a pagan have a lower opinion of the sun and the moon when 
he discovers them to be ideas ? Is it not admitted that they are 
ideas of sense ? Are not ideas of sense things for the Berkeleyan ? 
To this, one has to answer that they are and they are not. They 
are things in bad company, birds of a feather with ordinary 
"ideas," tarred with the same stick and partaking of the same 
reproach. 

Again, although it is plain from his attempt to make clear what is 
meant by the existence of his table, and from other passages,^ that 
Berkeley recognized the double sense of the word " exist" ; yet it is 
equally plain that he had no very distinct conception of the differ- 
ence between the two senses in which the word is used. His phrase- 
ology, even when he recognizes the distinction, shows that he does 
real existence the injustice of confounding it with a possibility of 
perception : " The table I write on I say exists, — that is, I see and 
feel it ; and if I were out of my study, I should say it existed — 
meaning thereby that if I was in my study, I might perceive it, or 
that some other spirit actually does perceive it." But existence 
as a possible perception, potential existence, seems to be such a 
mere shadow or semblance of existence, that Berkeley finds it 
impossible to rest in it, and is forced to conclude that, in the last 
analysis, there can be but one kind of existence after all. 

This comes out clearly in his attempt to answer the objection 
that, according to his principles, the objects we perceive by the 
senses must be annihilated and re-created at every moment, since 
these objects are our perceptions, and our perceptions are not con- 
tinuous but are intermittent. He denies that the doctrine of a 
continual annihilation and re-creation of things can be attributed 
to him. He has not maintained that things, to have existence, 
must be perceived by a particular mind. Things may be said to 
exist so long as they exist in any mind whatever. Our ideas of 

1 " A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," § 94. 
2 See the " Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous." 



128 The External World 

sense, i.e. real things, must have a continuous existence some- 
where. When not present to my mind, I may infer that tliey 
have existence in a Divine Mind, in which, as in a cupboard, ideas 
are preserved during the intervals of their existence in finite 
minds : " To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that 
sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit. 
Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that, 
seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence dis- 
tinct from being perceived by me, there must he some other Mind 
wherein they exist. As sure, therefore, as the sensible world reall}'- 
exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent Spirit who contains 
and supports it." ^ 

This theistic argument has never, so far as I know, carried 
conviction to the mind of any one. It is felt to be fantastic. The 
error upon which it rests is manifest. In it Berkeley loses again 
the distinction which he has somewhat vaguely recognized be- 
tween the two senses of the word ''exist," and feels impelled to 
maintain that whatever exists must have an intuitive existence in 
consciousness. At the same time, he assumes it to be self-evident 
that real things have a continuous existence — an existence not to 
be summed up in the sporadic glimpses of things given in our per- 
ceptions. In this he is falling back, it is interesting to note, upon 
the distinction, recognized implicitly or explicitly by us all, be- 
tween real things and our perceptions of them. But he is trying 
to turn a real thing into a permanent perception, and he sees no 
better way of doing this than by piecing out the deficiencies of one 
consciousness with patches taken from another. Real things made 
up in this extraordinary fashion are not Avorthy to be called real 
things, and they cannot get themselves recognized as such. 

From the foregoing it is clear that Berkeley has said quite 
enough to justify the suspicion with which his doctrine has been 
regarded. He has taken away one real world, and he has not 
given us another in its place. He has substituted a misunder- 
standing for a misunderstanding, and many feel that the last state 
of the man whom he has undertaken to reform is worse than the 
first. Yet he comes, as we have seen, near to the truth. He fur- 
nishes the materials for a critical restatement of the psychological 
doctrine of knowledge and the real world. He does not succeed 
in making the restatement. 
1 " Second Dialogue between Ilylas and Philonous" ; see also "Principles," § 48. 



Sensations and "Things'' 129 

We may criticise Berkeley's acute successor Hume somewhat 
as we have criticised Berkeley. Hume, too, fails to distinguish 
as he should between the two senses of the word " exist," and it is, 
hence, impossible for him to do justice to the real world. He 
occupies the psychological standpoint even while he finds fault 
with it. 

But the error of the two men is the same with a difference, 
and the difference is a characteristic one. Berkeley dimly recog- 
nizes that there are two ways in which things can exist ; he does 
not fully comprehend the distinction he has drawn, and, after 
making it, he obliterates it by trying to turn the continuous exist- 
ence of real things into an uninterrupted perception. But it 
should be remarked that he never doubts the continuous existence 
of real things, however oddly he explains it, and in this he is at 
one with common sense and with science. Hume follows the lead 
<5f his own reasonings gayly ; he is not easily shocked himself, and 
he appears to enjoy startling his reader. Instead of going with 
Berkeley to the end of the road, he makes a sharp turn and con- 
cludes that, although Nature compels us to believe in the con- 
tinued existence of real things in the intervals of our perception 
of them, yet this belief can be in no way justified before the bar of 
the reason. He has no difi&culty in showing that our perceptions 
themselves are intermittent, and that it is only through a miscon- 
ception that we can attribute to them a continued existence. And 
he thinks he finds it possible to prove that real things cannot for 
any good reason be assumed to have an existence distinct from our 
perceptions. It seems to follow that real things can have no ex- 
istence other than the interrupted existence which manifestly 
belongs to our perceptions. ^ 

In his attempt to prove that real things have no existence 
distinct from perception Hume is the pupil of Berkeley, and he 
vigorously attacks the psychological doctrine of representative 
perception. But it should not be overlooked that the statement 
that the objects of our perceptions are not distinct from our per- 
ceptions themselves is an ambiguous one. It may be true or false, 
according to the sense in which it is understood. It is quite possi- 
ble to deny, as we have seen, that my perception of the table and 
the real table stand over against one another as the psychological 
doctrine would have us believe, and yet to make a distinction 
1 "Treatise of Human Nature," Part IV, § 2. 



130 The External World 

between them. Hume does not recognize the fact that an expe- 
rience looked at in two different ways, an experience regarded as 
standing now in this connection and now in that, may acquire a 
right to two names, and may justly be made the subject of widely 
diverse judgments. The reader w^ho has followed the analyses of 
the preceding chapters has seen, I hope, in what sense perceptions 
are identical with real things and in what sense they are not. If 
no distinction whatever could be made between the two, then, of 
course, nothing whatever could be predicated of real things that 
could not be predicated of perceptions, and Hume would be quite 
right in denying to the former any sort of existence not attributable 
to the latter. This is what he actually does. Since he cannot see 
that the same experience may be looked at in two ways, he cannot 
recognize the double sense of the word "exist." 

Hume cannot be accused of obliterating the distinction between 
sense-experiences and the copies of these in memory and imagina- 
tion. It is interesting to note, however, that when he is explicitly 
discussing the distinction between '^ impressions " and " ideas," 
he overlooks Berkeley's most important criterion for singling out 
real things from the other elements in our experience. " Impres- 
sions " are made to differ from " ideas " only in that they are more 
lively and forceful.^ And since, as we have seen, the reality of 
real things, their real existence, is but the fact of their having a 
place in the orderly system of our experiences, it is to be expected 
that Hume, more or less slighting this fact, should sin more deeply 
than Berkeley in what he says of the external world. Berkeley 
confuses perceptions and real things, but he nevertheless holds on 
to real things with a good deal of energy. His sense-ideas usually 
remain to him things ; and he insists that his doctrine does not 
lead him far away from the common opinion of mankind. But the 
real world of things which Berkeley finds in consciousness shrivels 
in the hands of Hume into a world of mere perceptions. He 
impresses his reader as assuming throughout, as does the man who 
remains upon the psychological standpoint, that a real world, if it 
is to be found at all, must be found beyond consciousness ; that the 
stuff of which " impressions " are made cannot possibly enter into 
its composition. He remains, in fact, a psychologist, and yet he 
sees clearly that the external world of the psychologist will not do 

1 " Treatise of Human Nature," Book I, Part I, § 1 ; and "An Enquiry concern- 
ing the Human Understanding," § 2. 



Sensations and " Things " 131 

at all for tbe philosopher. Hence he throws it away, and becomes 
a psychologist bereft. He is able to bear his bereavement philo- 
sophically, but it has caused much annoyance to those to whom his 
reasonings have seemed unanswerable. 

Mill goes back to Berkeley, and takes up again his distinction 
between the two senses of the word " exist." But, instead of 
correcting the error into which Berkeley falls, he, too, concludes 
that the existence of things unperceived must be a merely poten- 
tial one. Real things are to him no more than "permanent possi- 
bilities of sensation." "We have seen that it is doing real things 
an injustice to confound them with possibilities of any sort, and 
also that this reference to sensation indicates an incomplete ab- 
straction. The admirable clearness with which he develops his 
doctrine makes it unmistakably plain that Mill cannot get away 
from the perception of real things, and consider merely the real 
things themselves?- 

1 See his chapter entitled, " The Psychological Theory of the Belief in an Ex- 
ternal World," "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy." 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN APPEARANCE AND REALITY 

From what has been said in the preceding chapters, does it not 
seem to follow that we must regard all sensations, of whatever 
description, as having a place in the real world of things ? What 
criterion of sensation is there save that which has been pointed 
out — a criterion which makes the very being of a sensation, as a 
sensation, to consist in the fact that it has a place in that fixed 
order of experiences that we call the real world ? 

The general reference of all sensations to a place in nature 
appears to be, moreover, not merely in harmony with the criterion 
of sensation which has been insisted upon, but also in harmony 
with the natural impulse of the plain man, who does not, unless 
forced to do so, discriminate between sensations of various classes, 
allowing to some a reality denied to others. It is safe to say that 
it is no less in harmony with the impulse of the man of science, 
when he is not specifically occupied with scientific theory, but is 
living the life common to us all in familiar intercourse with the 
real things that are perceived to surround him in his workaday 
world. 

He perceives the table before him to be extended, resisting, 
colored ; the lamp which he pushes away from him emits a sound ; 
the rose in the glass of water at his elbow smells sweet ; the 
swollen finger which he presses against his pen has a pain in it. 
The real world of things which he perceives about him is not 
made up of sensational elements of one or two classes exclusively. 
It contains things extended and resisting; but these things aie 
also colored and sonorous, and some of them may tingle with pain. 
What considerations can induce a man to conceive that real things, 
as they are, lack some of the properties which they seem to reveal 
themselves as possessing ? Why should a man give to certain 
sensations a preference over others, and, constructing for himself 
a paler copy of the rich and varied world of his actual experiences, 

1 02 



Distinction hetween Appearance and Reality 133 

declare this to be the real world from which the veil of appearance 
has been torn away? 

There is here, it should be observed, no question of a distinction 
between sensations and experiences of the class called imaginary. 
The color seen, the sound heard, the pain felt, are really seen, 
heard, and felt. They are not merely imagined. They are sen- 
sations, and in so far they belong to the same order as sensations 
of touch and movement, the ones commonly left to the real world 
when it has been robbed of all others. On what pretence shall 
they be excluded from the real world to which they certainly seem 
to belong? That men do come to discriminate between different 
classes of sensational experiences, allowing to some a place in the 
world of real things and denying such a place to others, is a fact 
with which the reader is, of course, familiar. In this chapter I 
shall try to show what has led to the emergence of this distinction, 
and shall exhibit the form that it has taken in the hands of the 
common-sense philosopher and of the man of science. 

The question of the reality of what is given in perception was 
recognized to be a problem calling for solution very early in the 
history of reflective thought. It was discovered that there must 
be a distinction between things as they appear and things as they 
really are. Such men as Anaxagoras and Democritus came to 
the conclusion that the senses are imperfect instruments, and are 
by themselves unable to discern the true nature of the elements 
that enter into the structure of the real world of things. This 
function, they thought, can be performed only by the reason, which 
has the power of passing beyond the data furnished by sense, and 
of grasping the reality that lies behind the veil. 

It seems scarcely too much to say that, just as soon as philos- 
ophy grew to be something more than a crude attempt at laying 
the foundations of physical science, its great problem was felt to 
be the nearer definition of the reality which underlies the play of 
appearances and which is not distinguished from appearances by 
the unreflective. And as reflection upon this problem made it 
evident that it is by no means easy of solution, there were, as we 
might expect, those who stood ready to deny either that there was 
such a problem, or that it was one for which any conceivable 
solution could be found. Thus Protagoras and Pyrrho, finding 
it impossible to retain the naive confidence in the power of the 
reason to transcend the mere appearance, and to rest in a reality 



134 The External World 

more satisfying, concluded that no truth — no such truth, at least, 
as has been the goal of the endeavors of earnest men from the 
dawn of reflective thought to the present day — is attainable by 
man. Of these worthies, the one seems to have maintained that 
every appearance is as real as every other ; while the other held 
that, although reality and appearance may theoretically be dis- 
tinguished, yet the mind is incapable of deciding between true and 
false appearances, and will, hence, do well to empty itself of all 
opinions whatever, to draw from appearances no conclusions of 
any sort, and to cultivate a vacuity in comparison with which the 
agnosticism of our day is dogmatism itself. 

Such a scepticism as this, it is, of course, impossible for a sane 
man to embrace, except in a professional capacity and for purposes 
of discussion. It is not difficult for us to see that Protagoras and 
Pyrrho, neither of whom was a madman, did really draw between 
appearance and reality the distinction of which their doctrine 
would rob them. Protagoras certainly recognized, in spite of 
himself, the distinction between real and apparent truth, for he 
conducted himself with propriety in the practical affairs in which 
he was involved, and he assumed in his discussions that he had 
truth to communicate, a truth in some sense common to himself 
and to his listener. As for Pyrrho, that ancient humbug is plainly 
betrayed by his gossiping biographer, Diogenes Laertius, who, 
after stating that Pyrrho's life corresponded to his principles and 
that he put no credence in the reports of his senses, goes on to 
tell us that he lived to a very advanced age, and that he never 
acted imprudently or did anything without due consideration I 

The sweeping denials of Protagoras and Pyrrho do not have 
their source in a clear perception of the fact that there is no differ- 
ence between appearance and reality, but may be taken as an 
expression of despair at the difficulty of knowing where to draw 
the line of demarcation. The helpless philosopher throws the 
handle after the hatchet, and denies what he is powerless to 
explain. He asks what is the real color of the neck of a dove, 
and the real weight of a stone. Shall he assume that these are just 
what they at a given moment seem to be ? Alas! the color changes 
at every instant as the bird turns its head; and the stone is found 
to have one weight in air and another in water. Which of the 
series of colors shall be regarded as the real one ? Is the stone 
really heavy and made light by water, or is it really light and 



Distinction between Appearance and Reality 135 

made heavy by air ? These ancient sceptics had stumbled upon 
the principle of relativity, and were routed by it as many have 
been routed since. 

I have said that the plain man does not, unless something forces 
him to do so, feel impelled to distinguish between the appearance 
of things and the things themselves; and I have also said that even 
the man of science, when he is dealing with the familiar things 
just about him, is not conscious of such a distinction. Appearance 
and reality seem to be so nicely adjusted to each other that the 
distinction between them altogether slips out of mind. This par- 
ticular appearance — the color of the desk at which I am writino- 
— seems to belong to the reality if anything does, to be an element 
in or an aspect of the reality itself, not a mere appearance through 
which something else is known really to exist. As long as I con- 
fine my attention to appearances of this sort, I feel little inclina- 
tion to think of them as appearances at all. To me my desk is 
colored, my clock does tick, the smoke from my cigar is fragrant. 
This that I see is my desk, and this that I hear is my clock. In 
such appearances, not through them, I seem to grasp my reality, 
and to grasp it just as it is. But it is not in such appearances 
alone that I live, and a reflection stung into activity by appear- 
ances more or less similar to these, but apparently less trustworthy, 
awakens a doubt touching these also. 

When I turn and look out of my window, I see as a faint 
bluish patch upon the horizon the tree that I passed yesterday and 
saw as a large expanse of vivid green. I recall my past experi- 
ence of the fact that the colors of things vary with the distance 
from which the things are seen ; that they do not look the same in 
the morning and at high noon ; that the passing of a cloud, the 
rising of a mist, may produce a change sufficiently marked even 
while I am gazing upon the landscape. 

It is impossible for me not to ask myself whether any one of 
these objects seen under varying aspects has a real color of its 
own, a something which belongs to it as its private property, a 
something independent of the change of circumstance which causes 
such a series of changes in my perception. And when I recall 
also the fact that objects which seem to me to present startling 
contrasts of color may not appear to my neighbor to differ in color 
at all, I am impelled to raise the question whether my own eyes 
may not be as important a circumstance as any in determining 



136 The External World 

whether the objects about me shall be seen as of this color 
or that. 

When, with all these considerations before me, I look again at 
my desk, I am forced to acknowledge that the reality which I 
seem to see before me has taken on a somewhat novel aspect. I 
catch myself wondering whether I can produce evidence that the 
desk really is more like the thing it seems, when seen at close 
quarters, than like that which it seems under other circumstances. 
The particular experience which appeared to be so indubitable 
and so satisfactory is seen to be one of a series which fade into 
each other by imperceptible degrees. It obeys all the laws of the 
series to which it belongs, it is in no sense a thing apart and inde- 
pendent. If I regard — as I undoubtedly do — certain of the 
members of the series as mere appearances, giving, it is true, some 
indication of the reality which they represent, but in no sense a 
constituent part of it, by what right shall I single out this particu- 
lar member of the series and insist that in it I grasp the reality 
at first hand ? How shall I justify the assumption that, although 
a tree at a distance looks blue, the tree really is green, and that 
this desk at which I write really is the color that it seems to be ? 
Must I not in consistency admit that this visual experience, so 
vivid, so insistent, so seemingly real, is nevertheless no true part 
of the real thing I call my desk, but is a mere appearance, nay, a 
delusive appearance, since, in spite of all my reflections, I find it 
hard to realize, while I look at it, that this particular expanse 
of color is not actually before me, as independent and as much 
outside of my body as anything belonging to the desk can be ? 
Perish the thought that I should be deceived in what seems so 
clearly and so immediately known as this! — and yet, how shall 
I answer the reflections that impel me along the steep descent 
which Pyrrho travelled before me? 

It is plain that if it is possible by reflection to rob external 
objects of their color, it can be no difficult task to relieve them of 
some of the other properties above mentioned. 

I perceive that the sounds emanating from my clock are loud 
or low as I approach the clock or recede from it. If I stop my 
ears with my fingers, they disappear altogether. I notice that as a 
series of sounds rises in pitch, there comes a point at which, to me, 
sound gives place to silence, while b}^ my neighbor it is still heard 
as sound. Can I, in the face of such facts as these, continue to 



Distinction hetiveen Appearance and Reality 137 

believe that the sound I now hear so distinctly coming from the 
clock close in front of me is really the external and real thing it 
seems to be ? It is certainly my first impulse to think so ; but 
must I not correct this impulse and regard the sound heard as 
merely an effect of some sort upon my ears, an indication of some- 
thing itself not heard at all ? 

And the same conclusions force themselves upon me when I 
reflect upon my experiences of odors and of tastes. The odor of 
the rose, the taste of the apple, occasion all sorts of perplexities if 
I insist upon regarding them as really in the things in which they 
appear to be. Does the rose still smell sweet when I am suffering 
from a cold in the head? And is a sweet apple still in itself 
sweet, when the bodily change effected by an indigestion makes it 
to me bitter and offensive ? As to that wretched pain which throbs 
in every part of a swollen finger, that pain which seems so unmis- 
takably just where it is and nowhere else — this, too, it appears, 
must range itself among the things that are not what they seem, 
for the psychologist tells me that the seat of the pain is not the 
finger, but the brain, and he offers something like proof for this 
assertion. He points out that the swollen finger is not felt as 
painful if the nerve that serves as medium of communication with 
the brain be severed ; and then he relates various puzzling instances 
of pains that have been clearly felt as in a finger or in a toe, 
when the previous amputation of the member has put it beyond 
all doubt that the pain in question was a lying appearance, and 
was palming itself off for what it could not possibly be. 

When one ruminates upon all these things, it is impossible not 
to feel a certain sympathy with the Pyrrhonist. The most familiar 
objects take on an unfamiliar aspect. The plain man to whom 
such difficulties have been suggested, is no longer in the enjoyment 
of his primitive simplicity. He has begun to recast his world, to 
discriminate between appearances, and to reject some, which he 
never thought of doubting before, from the realm of reality. What- 
ever may be the result of his reflections, he is not likely to assert 
that there is no such thing as reality. That is not done in our day. 
But he may very well feel a good deal of perplexity in the endeavor 
to decide what he shall consider reality, and what he shall refuse to 
regard as such. It is well to remark the fact that even after the 
trail of the serpent of doubt has laid its blight upon every corner 
of his unreflective paradise, there are times when he has revulsions 



138 The External World 

of feeling, and forgets that he has eaten of the fruit of the tree of 
knowledge. When he gazes at the pen which he holds in his 
hand or scrutinizes the desk before him, he still feels that these 
particular appearances are real and belong to his real world. To 
him these things again are what they appear, and his previous 
reflections are forgotten. To bring these experiences once more 
in doubt, he must recall what has temporarily passed from his 
mind, and fall back upon a wider experience, the elements of which 
do not seem to be so completely in harmony. 

Perhaps no one has drawn the line between appearance and 
reality in a way more satisfactory to the plain man who has 
entered upon the path of reflection, but has not taken leave of 
common sense and plunged headlong into the shadowy realm of 
the metaphysician, than has John Locke in his immortal " Essay." 
We have seen that even the plain man distinguishes between his 
ideas and the things they are supposed to represent. Upon this 
distinction Locke takes his stand, and by its aid he smoothes away 
the difficulties presented in the preceding paragraphs. Real things 
exist outside of us, and they cause ideas in our minds. 

" The notice we have by our senses of the existing of things 
without us, though it be not altogether so certain as our intuitive 
knowledge, or the deductions of our reason, emplo3^ed about the 
clear abstract ideas of our own minds ; yet it is an assurance that 
deserves the name of knowledge. If we persuade ourselves that 
our faculties act and inform us right, concerning the existence of 
those objects that affect them, it cannot pass for an ill-grounded 
confidence : for I think nobody can, in earnest, be so sceptical as 
to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and 
feels. At least, he that can doubt so far (whatever he may have 
with his own thoughts) will never have any controversy with me ; 
since he can never be sure that I say anything contrary to his own 
opinion. As to myself, I think God has given me assurance 
enough of the existence of things without me, since by their differ- 
ent application I can produce in myself both pleasure and pain, 
which is one great concernment of my present state. This is 
certain, the confidence that our faculties do not herein deceive us 
is the greatest assurance we are capable of, concerning the exist- 
ence of material things. For we cannot act anything but by our 
faculties ; nor talk of knowledge itself, but by the helps of those 
faculties which are fitted to apprehend even what knowledge is. 



Distinction between Appearance and Reality 139 

But besides the assurance we have from our senses themselves, 
that they do not err in the information they give us, of the exist- 
ence of things without us, when they are affected by them, we are 
farther confirmed in this assurance by other concurrent reasons."^ 

These concurrent reasons are as follows : Perceptions must be 
produced in us by exterior causes affecting our senses, for those 
who lack the organs of a sense lack the appropriate sensations. 
The organs themselves do not produce them, for then the eyes of 
a man in the dark would produce colors, and his nose would smell 
roses in the winter. Again, I can recall and banish what memories 
I will, but when I look with open eyes at the sun, it is not in my 
power to reject the ideas the sun causes in me. Between ideas in 
the memory and genuine sensations there is no little difference, 
and the latter must be referred to the " brisk acting " of objects 
without me, and to nothing else. In the third place, the sensation 
of pain is one thing and imaginary pain another. It is absurd to 
put them upon the same level. Real pains are caused by real 
external things disturbing our bodies, and that is why they disturb 
us. Finally, our senses support one another's testimony. He that 
sees a fire may put his hand into it. Can he longer doubt ? 

All this is the very quintessence of the philosophy of common 
sense. There are external things and there are minds ; and the 
external things affect the minds, thus producing sensations which 
give knowledge of the things. And how neatly this explains how 
it is that things make themselves known through such a perplexing 
and apparently inconsistent variety of appearances. Our ideas, 
i,e. the appearances of which we are immediately conscious, are 
in the mind. In the external thing there are qualities, which are 
certain powers to produce ideas in us. Some of these qualities, 
which we may call original or primary, are inseparable from things, 
and exist in things as we perceive them. In other words, our 
ideas of them truly resemble them, and give us correct information 
as to what they are. These primary qualities of bodies are their 
solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number. But things 
can, by their primary qualities, produce in us many sensations 
which do not truly represent anything in the things themselves. 
Such effects upon us of the primary qualities are colors, sounds, 
tastes, odors, pains, etc. These must not be considered as outside 
of the mind. They are internal effects of the action of an external 
1 "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book IV, Chapter XI, § 3. 



140 The External World 

reality, and must not be projected outward. The bulk, number, 
figure, and motion of the parts of things are really in them whether 
we perceive them or not. But colors, tastes, sounds, and the rest, 
vanish, when the perceiving sense is withdrawn, into nothingness.^ 
When once this distinction is grasped, it is easy to see how there 
may be a varying appearance of an unvarying reality, and it is 
possible to distinguish the latter from the former. 

Thus I recognize the fact that the tree seen now as small, 
faint, and blue, and now as large, vivid, and unmistakably green, 
has no real color at all. The whole series of colors, and, I must 
add, the whole series of sizes given in vision, must be regarded as 
a series of effects produced upon my sense by an external thing 
that cannot be said to resemble any member in the series. If I 
am near the thing, it looks green and it looks large ; if I am far 
away from it, it looks blue and it looks small. This is as it should 
be. When things act upon me under varying circumstances, they 
should produce varying results. The shifting iridescence of the 
colors upon the turning neck of Pyrrho's dove need have occa- 
sioned him no anxiety, had he been shrewd enough to grasp the 
truth that the neck remained the same as to "bulk, figure, and 
motion of parts," and that the play of colors was just where it 
should be, in his own mind. He could have seized the reality 
through the appearance, and have saved himself from universal 
scepticism. There is, then, a real world of things external to my 
mind, and of this world I can form a just notion by exercising 
sufficient discretion in discriminating between appearances which 
really correspond to things and appearances which merely indicate 
what things are, under such and such circumstances, doing to me. 
If I fall into error, the fault is mine. 

In the above exposition of Locke's doctrine I have modified it 
in but one trifling particular, and in making this modification I 
have shown myself a better Lockian than he.^ At first sight the 
doctrine appears to be fairly consistent with itself, and to give a 
plausible explanation of the fact that we do find it possible to 
draw a distinction between things as they are and things as they 

1 "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book II, Chapter VIII. 

2 That is to say, I have argued about the series of sizes which seem to be given 
in vision as he has about the series of colors, in so far, at least, as to conclude that 
we cannot regard the "real" size of the thing to be given in any one of the visual 
experiences. 



Distinction hetiveen Appearance and Reality 141 

appear to us. There is certainly something very taking about it 
to a man at a certain stage of his progress in reflection. It 
explains the real world, without wholly recasting it ; it explains it 
without abandoning the psychological standpoint of which so 
much has been said in this volume, the standpoint of common 
sense and of natural science. The real world is still there, robbed 
of its colors and certain other things, it is true ; but it is there as a 
photograph is there to represent a painting. One has at least an 
outline, and some other hints and indications which enable one at 
will to supply what is lacking. By keeping pretty constantly 
before one the reasonings out of which this real world has grown, 
one may come to make it appear, at times, very real. 

But even to the man who champions it, it seems often to fade 
away, and to give place to the less ethereal and more fleshly world 
of his familiar experiences. When one thinks of shifting colors, 
faint and distant objects, bitter tastes that normally should be 
sweet, sounds audible to some and not to others, et id omne genus, 
it grows, as I have said above, more or less substantial. But when 
one sits at one's desk, lays one's hand on the expanse of color, 
hears the cheerful ticking of the clock, which loudly reiterates its 
denial that it can by any conceivable right be banished to any 
world of phantoms — then this world of colors, sounds, and the 
rest asserts its right to be regarded as the real world, and the other 
fades away into the unreality of things merely thought of. The 
man who reflects seems to live in at least two real worlds, and to 
live in these alternately. If he always reflected, he might be able 
to stay permanently in one. 

The real world recognized by modern science is essentially the 
same with the real world of Locke. We are told that nothing 
exists in the physical universe save matter and energy. Matter 
occupies space, and may be made to change its position in space. 
Energy may be regarded as "a condition of matter in virtue of 
which any definite portion of it may be made to effect changes in 
other definite portions."^ Energy may be distinguished as energy 
of position and energy of motion, and these two are convertible 
with each other according to certain definite laws. No particle of 

1 G. Y. Barker, " Physics," Chapter I. We sometimes meet, at the present day, 
with a much broader use of the word "energy." The extension of the term does 
not appear to me to be fruitful. See the account of Ostwald's doctrine in Chap- 
ter XXXI. 



142 The External World 

matter can be created or destroyed ; and the sum of the potential 
and kinetic energy in the universe must always remain constant. 

The real world consists, then, of masses of matter distributed 
in space and moving in diverse ways. It is not to be conceived as 
a world of colors, sounds, tastes, odors, and the rest. This sub- 
jective world, the world of appearances, comes into being when a 
certain small mass of matter, a brain, is acted upon in certain defi- 
nite ways by masses of matter in motion. However important the 
differences between the real world as it was conceived by one who 
wrote before the days of Lavoisier and Joule, and the world as 
science now conceives it, the line between appearance and reality 
is still found where it was before. To the masses of matter which 
produce appearances we may not attribute more than " their solid- 
it}?-, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number." 

But modern science has much to say regarding the intimate 
composition of such bodies. Where Locke was unable to do more 
than to speak vaguely of the " insensible particles " of bodies that 
manifest their existence to the senses by the effects which they 
produce, we are in the possession of a mass of information very 
carefully worked over, based upon observation and painstaking 
experiment, and certainly as worthy of at least a guarded accept- 
ance as is much to which we yield credence, touching the minute 
parts of things. 

According to this doctrine the pen which I hold in my hand is 
not the continuously extended, motionless thing that it seems to 
be. It is composed of molecules in rapid motion and situated at 
considerable distances from each other. A molecule is the small- 
est portion of any substance which exhibits the properties of that 
substance. But the molecule itself must not be regarded, as I was 
at first inclined to regard the whole pen, as one continuous thing. 
It is composed of atoms, and these atoms may separate from one 
another and form new combinations with other atoms, which com- 
binations will possess new properties. Thus substances may be 
decomposed, and out of their elements new substances may be 
built up. In all such transformations nothing remains unchanged 
except the atom, which passes from molecule to molecule, enters 
now into this combination, now into tliat, is driven about from one 
end of the universe to the other, but everywhere retains its iden- 
tity and its peculiar character. 

There appears to be no little difference between a view of the 



Distinction hetween Appearance and Reality 143 

real world which conceives it to be made up of extended things 
which actually exist as they are represented in our ideas, and this 
view which dissolves the physical universe into a whirl of atoms, 
the eddies in which make themselves perceptible to the senses 
in such ways as to give birth to the colorless phantoms which 
Locke left us when he robbed us of the secondary qualities of 
bodies. His real world was at least a something given in percep- 
tion. This world of atoms we cannot perceive at all. We conceive 
it with pain and labor, and everything that is in it has been wrung 
from nature by a laborious process of inference. What lies on the 
surface is always and everywhere to be recognized as appearance. 
The reality is hidden, and must be groped for. Even when found, 
it is not grasped directly ; we do not perceive it ; we only know 
that it must be there. 

But the modification of the Lockian doctrine offered us by the 
modern Atomism is, after all, only a modification, a development. 
The doctrine remains, as has been said, very much the same at 
bottom. There is still an external world of things, and this is not 
a world of colors, sounds, odors, tastes, etc., but a world of things 
extended, resisting, moving about in space. By their action upon 
us, such things cause us to see colors, hear sounds, and the rest. 
To such a world Locke gave some slight recognition in his asser- 
tion that the " insensible particles " of bodies produce effects upon 
our minds. But notwithstanding this admission of the fact that 
bodies are composed of minute particles, and that we cannot per- 
ceive these as they are, Locke held that we do truly perceive 
bodies as they are. In other words, he held that our ideas of them 
truly resemble them. This inconsistency modern science has 
remedied. It has transferred to the atom what Locke declared to 
be true of masses of matter as wholes. It does not maintain that 
we can perceive the atom, but it claims that we can, with some 
approach to accuracy, truly represent it. 

Atoms are extended, and occupy space; they exclude each 
other from the same portion of space at any instant ; they are capa- 
ble of changing their location and their relations to each other. 
In short, they are little bodies, endowed with primary qualities, 
and capable, under appropriate circumstances, of begetting appear- 
ances. That they are not immediately perceived is a matter of 
small importance, and need not in itself affect the question of their 
reality. We accept as real much that we do not immediately per- 



144 The External World 

ceive. Even the masses of matter which Locke regards us as per- 
ceiving are not, on his own principles, immediately perceived. 
They are represented by ideas ; and there is no valid reason for 
affirming that atoms may not be as truly, though symbolically, 
represented, as bodies of a larger size. 

As to the general nature of the reasonings upon which the doc- 
trine of atoms and molecules rests, that is in no sense occult and 
beyond the comprehension of the unlearned. One reasons here 
as one reasons when dealing with things commonly believed to be 
open to direct inspection. We have abundant evidence that 
things which cannot, under given circumstances, be directly per- 
ceived to have parts, can be seen to have them when circumstances 
are changed. A mere diminution of the distance between the 
object in question and the observing eye may be sufficient to reveal 
the composite nature of what did not before seem to be composite. 
In the same way, things may turn out to be a mere group of sepa- 
rate things, an agglomeration of discontinuous parts, when they 
did not at first appear to be of this nature. One need only walk 
toward a distant clump of trees, or hold a loosely woven fabric 
between the eye and the light, to be made conscious of this fact. 
Things, furthermore, that we hastily assume to be at rest, are dis- 
covered to be in motion. No one doubts the motion of the minute 
hand of his watch merely because he does not see it move. Nor is 
there anything foreign to common experience in the notion of a 
new set of properties arising out of new groupings of atoms. We 
have too often put together to make a third thing, differing in its 
properties from any of its constituents, the sorts of things with 
which our senses seem to make us acquainted. 

All these experiences serve to make comprehensible to us the 
real world advocated by the man of science. It is still the real 
world in which we find ourselves when once we have made a dis- 
tinction between the primary and secondary qualities of matter. 
Our attention has passed from things to the "insensible particles'* 
of things and their groupings ; it concerns itself with very little 
things instead of with large ones. But we still think of the little 
things as we thought before of the larger ones of which we con- 
ceive these to be parts. 

It does not concern me here to describe in detail the reasonings 
which have resulted in this view of the physical universe, nor even 
to set forth that view except in the merest outline. I have spoken 



Distinction between Appearance and Reality 145 

briefly of atoms and molecules, but have not even touched upon 
the speculations which have been hazarded regarding the possible 
structure of the atom, the explanation of certain of its properties, 
the nature of the ether, and other matters of the sort, concerning 
which the physicist speaks with a somewhat hesitating utterance. 

Whether atoms remain forever unchanged, or whether they may 
in the rush of the elemental forces be rent asunder; whether they 
are to be regarded as bits of matter that are rigid and immobile 
within their own skin, or whether they may be assumed to be 
centres of energy analogous to whirling rings of smoke ; whether 
the ether is corpuscular in structure, or whether it is continuous ; 
all these questions, and such as these, concern the physicist rather 
than the metaphysician. They are matters of detail, and may be 
passed over by one who desires only to discover where the scien- 
tist draws the line between appearance and reality. Even the 
truth of the atomic theory is not here of great importance. The 
doctrine may come to be modified, and will be modified or even 
rejected, if some other doctrine gets to be recognized as a better 
explanation of the facts of our experience. But it seems safe to 
predict that any new doctrine that takes its place will distinguish 
between appearance and reality after somewhat the same way as 
it does. The history of science reveals that science is in this 
respect consistently Lockian. There is good reason why this 
should be so, as I shall try to make plain soon. 

From the foregoing it appears evident that, before one can 
rise to the conception of the material world as it seems to be 
revealed to modern science, one must have made a distinction, not 
merely between sensations and things imaginary, but also between 
sensations of different classes. All sensations may have reality 
in a sense in which things imaginary have not. Its reference 
to an external world may still be regarded as guaranteeing a sen- 
sation to be a sensation, even after a man has become an unscien- 
tific or a scientific Lockian, and has come to regard as merely 
" subjective " the colors, odors, etc., which he formerly supposed to 
be qualities of external things. But within the realm of sensations 
the difference of classes appears to be an extremely important one, 
and the distinction between the external world as it appears and 
the external world as it really is, between appearance and reality, 
seems to be bound up with it. The significance of this distinction 
between classes of sensations I shall discuss in the next chapter. 



CHAPTER IX 

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN APPEARANCE 

AND REALITY 

I HAVE said that the distinction between the physical universe 
of things existing in space and moving in space and the inner 
world of the effects, produced by such motions, within our con- 
sciousness, seems to present a convenient criterion for separating the 
real from the apparent. According to this doctrine, the morning 
stars may sing together as energetically as they please : they can 
produce no sound unless there be a listening ear and the appropri- 
ate medium for conducting vibrations to it. Without is matter in 
motion ; within are colors, sounds, tastes, odors, pains, and anything 
else that can come under the head of sensation. The physical world 
is one thing, and the circle of our sensations is another. The one 
is the realm of the real ; the other, the world of appearances. 

To be sure, the man who accepts literally the Lockian distinc- 
tion between ideas and things, occupies the psychological stand- 
point of which so much has been said earlier in this work. He 
distinguishes between ideas and the things they represent, places 
the former in consciousness and the latter outside of it, and, after 
burning every bridge that can lead from the one world to the 
other, assumes confidently that he is a citizen of both, and can pass 
freely between the two, describing in detail their resemblances and 
their differences. 

To Locke, as to every one else, bodies appeared to be, not 
merely extended, but also colored. He affirmed them to be really 
extended, but not really colored. On what ground did he thus 
discriminate between extension and color? One will search his 
writings in vain for a single scrap of real evidence adduced to 
prove that some ideas (those of the primary qualities of bodies) 
have their duplicates in an external world, while other ideas 
(those of the secondary qualities) are not thus duplicated in 
things. Locke attempts something like a proof, it is true, but it 

14G 



Significance of the Distinction 147 

is easy to see that his would-be proof consists in taking a given 
experienced content now for an idea and now for a thing. He 
contradicts himself flatly, as, indeed, he must. He cannot ride 
to a satisfactory conclusion, for he has from the outset been astride 
of a contradiction. 

And every modern Lockian, whether scientific or non-scientific, 
sticks in the same difficulty. If the sounds and colors that I per- 
ceive do not exist in a world beyond us, but come into being in me 
when my body is acted upon in certain ways, why may not the 
same be true of the resistance, the extension, the motion, that I 
seem to perceive in things ? Can I perceive bodies to be resisting, 
extended, or in motion, unless they act upon my body ? May not 
the resulting complex of sensations in this case, too, be whoU}^ dif- 
ferent from the external cause ? Perhaps the real world is not, 
then, the extended and imaginable thing that I have thought it. 
Perhaps it is only a name for the unknown, a something that I 
cannot more nearly define. 

The man of science usually does not, it is true, strip the real 
world quite so bare as this. He denies to it some of the qualities 
it appears to have, but permits it to retain others. His position 
seems, however, to be one very arbitrarily assumed. He stops 
where he does, when he seems to us to have a logical momentum 
which ought to carry him farther. The next stage in his progress 
would result in the unknowable, and the final stage would bring 
him to the repudiation of even that shadow. It is only necessary 
for me, in this connection, to remind my reader of the illustration 
of the prisoner in the cell, ^ and to insist that even an external 
Unknowable cannot be attained with the aid of the resources at 
his command. Watering the external world into utter indefinite- 
ness does not justify the assumption of its existence ; the reality 
of things is not a function of their vagueness. 

In so far, therefore, as the man of science distinguishes between 
appearance and reality by placing the former in consciousness and 
the latter without it, his position may be justly criticised by the 
metaphysician. Were no other reality than this attainable, he 
would be forced to get on without any reality at all. But we have 
seen that the body of truth presented us in the natural sciences is 
not to be repudiated merely because the scientist is not also a meta- 
physician. We may assume that what he has to tell us of the real 

1 See Chapter II. 



148 The External World 

world is not said of a world of which he knows nothing from direct 
observation, and which he arbitrarily creates. The distinction be- 
tween the " inner" and the " outer" worlds is a distinction within 
consciousness, taking that word in the broad sense. It ought to 
be possible, therefore, to restate what science tells us of the line 
which divides appearance from reality, in such a way as to elimi- 
nate the contradiction which seems to belong to the natural science 
point of view. 

To do this it is only necessary to examine carefully what is 
actually done by the Lockian and the student of modern science 
when they draw a distinction between tlie real physical world as it 
is in its nakedness and the variegated garb under which it presents 
itself to consciousness. That we are able to see clearly the true 
significance of this distinction we owe to the analytic genius of 
Berkeley, who in his " New Theory of Vision " first succeeded in 
turning the light upon what had been a very obscure corner in our 
experience. Berkeley's analysis has been so frequently repeated 
by others, and his doctrine, with somewhat insignificant modifica- 
tions and additions, has been so thoroughly incorporated into the 
psychology of our day, that I may assume the reader to be familiar 
with at least its general outline. I shall, hence, not dwell upon it 
in detail, but shall attempt, in general harmony with it, a brief 
explanation of the distinction with which we are here concerned. 

We have seen in a preceding chapter ^ that, when we ask our- 
selves what we mean by perceived objects, we discover that they 
are groups of sensational elements, and we conceive them to be 
highly complex groups. 

My table appears to me as hard, extended, colored, warm or 
cold, etc. We have seen, furthermore, that my table means to me 
much more than the particular group of actual sensations that I 
may be experiencing at any one moment. At this moment I be- 
lieve the table to have an under side which I do not see, and I 
regard that as just as truly existent as that wliich is now in the 
sense. In other words, I believe that a multitude of sensational 
elements belong to this group which are never at one time directly 
perceived to belong to it. 

But this is not all. My table is a thing with a history: it has 
a past, and it will have a future. That is to say, it is not merely 
a group of sensations conceived of as existing in the present mo- 

1 Chapter VI. 



Significance of the Distinction 149 

ment. This group is continuous with an indefinite number of 
sensational elements belonging to the past, and will give place 
to sensational elements belonging to the future. This amounts 
merely to saying that I conceive my table, not merely as existing, 
but as having existed, and as being about to exist in time to 
come. 

It is of great importance to note that, although my table is, in 
one sense, a unit, it is, nevertheless, a vastly complex group of 
different elements. This is a truth we are in no small danger of 
overlooking, and such an oversight can only result in confusion. 
We habitually speak of seeing the same table that we touch, and 
we declare a table seen to-day to be the same with one seen yester- 
day. What can the word " same " mean when used in such a con- 
nection? Can the sense of sight give us anything but colors, or 
the sense of touch anything but tactual sensations ? Is yesterday's 
experience, either remembered or imagined, strictly identical with 
the experience of to-day ? It was the imperfect recognition of the 
complex character of the objects of perception, and the misconcep- 
tion of the true nature of their unity, that occasioned Pyrrho's per- 
plexity regarding the apple. The apple appears to the sight to be 
yellow, to the taste to be sweet, and to the smell to be fragrant. 
What is the real nature of the apple ? How can one thing be all 
of these ? 

The difficulty vanishes when we recognize that by one " thing " 
we mean one group of interrelated elements, of elements so con- 
nected that any one may stand for the whole group and give 
information regarding it. When I say I see the table I do not 
mean merely that I am conscious of certain color-sensations. 
When I say that I feel it, I do not mean merely that I am con- 
scious of certain sensations of touch and resistance. When I say 
that I see and touch the same thing, I evidently do not mean that 
what is immediately present in the sense in the one case is identical 
with what is immediately present in the other. It would be mere 
nonsense to affirm this. By affirming that I see and touch the 
same thing, I can only mean that the two experiences in question 
belong to the same group, and that either may be taken as repre- 
sentative of the group as a whole. 

But it should be remarked that in such a group of interrelated 
sensational elements all the elements have not equal values. It 
was maintained by Berkeley, and his position has, under much 



150 The External World 

criticism, remained unshaken, that our experiences of touch and 
movement form a nucleus of such importance in the whole com- 
plex which we call an object, that, when we come to distinguish 
between real and apparent objects at all, it is to this nucleus that 
we refer when we speak of the real object. All our judgments of 
distance, of magnitude, of position, have reference to the tactual 
thing, not to the visual, to the auditory, or to any other. Where 
is the faint blue patch of color which means to me a tree at a 
distiince? Is it half a mile away? When I walk half a mile it 
is hopelessly lost ; it began to change when I first moved, and has 
been succeeded by an indefinite series of visual sensations no two 
of which are precisely alike. To regain it, I must go back again 
to the point from which I started. What is it, then, that is half a 
mile distant? The tactual core of the whole series of experiences 
which constitute my experience of a tree. And what is meant by 
saying that anything is half a mile away ? In terms of what must 
distance be ultimately interpreted? In sensations of movement. 
As Berkeley has expressed it, the visual element in a thing stands 
related to the tactual as sign to thing signified. It is the latter in 
which our thought rests even when it appears to be occupied with 
the former. 

The distinction between sign and thing signified, between such 
sensations as those of sound or of hearing, and the tactual things 
of which they give us information, is one rather forced upon us in 
cases where the sign is not wholly satisfactory, or where reflection 
faces the task of trying to pick out from a whole series of signs 
the one which shall be regarded as in a special sense belonging to 
the object. This we saw in the last chapter. We saw also that, 
in certain cases, it is exceedingly difficult to realize that we must 
still draw the distinction. It is not very hard to distinguish 
between a faint blue patch of color and the real tree; but as I sit 
at my desk, lay my hand upon it, and explore its surface with my 
eyes, it is hard, indeed, to realize that what I see and what I touch 
are not strictly the same, that they are not identical, but are merely 
diverse elements in the one complex group of sensations. The 
thing seen seems to correspond so exactly to the thing touched, 
to share so absolutely its extension and position, that it appears 
impossible to divorce them. The sign is so satisfactory that it 
has fused completely with the thing signified, and I can no longer 
distinc^uish between them. I am forced to exclaim: Is not this 



Significance of the Distinction 151 

expanse of color really extended, and seen to be extended? 
Does not the color occupy the same place as the thing touched? 
How, then, can one maintain that all our judgments of distance, 
magnitude, and position refer ultimately only to the world of 
things tactual? How hold that these conceptions have no other 
content than that which is furnished by sensations of touch and 
movement ? 

Those who have grasped but imperfectly the significance of 
Berkeley's analysis are inclined to maintain that these conceptions 
may have another content. Sensations of all classes, it is claimed, 
have the quality of voluminousness, they have an " extensity " 
which is, in embryo, the notion of space. This is the primary 
intuition of space, which may be furnished by any sense ; and the 
question arises how these various spaces, tactual and motor, visual, 
auditory, and the rest, are joined together into the one space of 
our developed and interrelated experience. 

But those who reason thus have fallen into error through over- 
looking a distinction of fundamental importance. They have con- 
fused " extensity," the primary experience of voluminousness, with 
" extension " ; they have confounded an experience assumed to be 
taken in its naked simplicity, with the same experience supple- 
mented by its interpretation in terms of a different kind. 

Undoubtedly the extensity of sensations of all classes is not 
without its significance. The retina of the eye is a surface, and 
the stimulation of a small part and that of a larger part would 
make themselves known in consciousness by some difference in the 
resulting sensation. It would be impossible to interpret visual 
sensations in tactual as we actually do ; it would be impossible to 
recognize one part of the visual experience as referring to one 
part of the tactual object and another part of the same experience 
as referring to another, were the visual experience itself not 
composite. 

But it is one thing to admit this, and another to maintain that 
the mere consciousness of the visual sensations as thus composite 
would give us a notion of extended things in any way comparable 
to that which we possess. Introspective analysis reveals that 
when we imagine a line, a surface, or a solid, we do more than 
merely to recall into consciousness a certain quantity of visual 
sensation. The imaginary line or surface is conceived as vaguely 
localized in space. It is out beyond us, looked at from some more 



152 The External World 

or less definite point of view, and we measure it by moving an 
imaginary finger to it and along it. It is visual sensation as 
interpreted, not visual sensation pure and simple. The sign upon 
whicli we have elected to gaze has dragged in with it the thing 
signified. We are dealing with a real line, not with a merely 
visual experience. 

Had we never had sensations of touch and of movement, it 
would, of course, have been impossible for us thus to reduce otlier 
sensations to the subordinate position of signs. The extensity of 
the sensations allowed us might then have played an independent 
role of some importance. But as things are, we must recognize 
the fact that sensations other than those of touch and movement, 
notwithstanding the fact of their extensity, do not give us spaces 
or places at all ; they stand merely as the signs of such spaces or 
places, and such spaces or places are tactual. All space is tactual 
space. Colors do not occupy the same place as the tactual things 
to which they belong. They do not occupy space at all, nor do 
sounds or tastes or odore. Thus we see that the problem of join- 
ing together the chaotic mass of elementary spaces furnished by 
the different classes of sensations gives place to another. That 
problem is: How does it come that all other classes of sensations 
find their interpretation in sensations of touch and movement? 
Why do the latter constitute for us the real thing rather than 
the former? 

It is to be noted that the group of sensations we are now dis- 
cussing, the " real " core of a material object, is, as compared with 
sensations of other classes, relatively constant and unchanging. 
The visual sensations which make me aware of the presence of 
a real thing may vary within very wide limits. I may have a good 
look at a man, as I express it, and a very complex mass of color- 
sensations, giving much information regarding the tactual object, 
is present in consciousness. I may see him at a greater distance, 
and the visual sensations experienced are very different. I may 
see him still further away, and the visual object is reduced to a 
mere speck of faint color. " The visual object " does not mean in 
the one case what it does in the other. Neither quantitatively nor 
qualitatively does it remain unchanged. Yet I regard the real 
man as unchanged in size. I know that if I approach sufficiently 
near to pass my hand over him, I shall find that he feeh much the 
same at different times. The world of objects made known to me 



Significance of the Distinction 153. 

in sensations of touch and movement is not so fluctuating a world 
as that which reveals itself in vision. 

Nevertheless, as directly revealed in sensation, it is not an 
absolutely constant world. An object as known to the sensitive 
finger-tips, and the same object as measured in terms of the sensa- 
tions furnished by a less discriminating part of the body, are not 
felt to be strictly the same. A body lifted by a wearied arm feels 
heavier than the same body lifted by an arm which is fresh and 
vigorous. But a multitude of experiences has revealed to us the 
fact that the world of tactual things is one the objects of which 
can be accurately measured in terms of each other, and this fur- 
nishes us with a system of quantitative relations relatively inde- 
pendent of the immediate consciousness of quantity given in 
particular experiences. 

No one judges that a stick is exactly a metre long by simply 
passing his hand over it. The stick is compared with a standard, 
and this standard is recognized as holding definite and constant 
relations to the things which make up the tactual world. The 
immediate experience, as such, is overlooked ; or perhaps I would 
better say, is referred to, and is judged in the light of, the whole 
system of relations which obtain among tactual things. A heavy 
basket, carried for half a mile, seems to increase in weight, but no 
one dreams of judging that the weight has really increased with 
the length of the journey. If there is any doubt about the matter, 
there are the scales. 

It was pointed out by Berkeley that tactual things are more 
important to us than visual, since it is chiefly through their tactual 
qualities that objects affect us for good or ill. This has frequently 
been emphasized since as helping to account for the fact that our 
other sensations fall into the place of signs and our sensations 
of touch and movement acquire a certain primacy. It cannot 
be denied that sensations which are for any reason important to us 
tend to stand out from the others, and those which are less im- 
portant tend to be regarded as marks of the former. This is true 
of other classes of sensations than those of touch and movement. 
But the most important element in the prominence given to our 
sensations of touch and movement appears to be their susceptibility 
of accurate measurement. They fall into an interrelated system 
which is capable of accurate description, and through their rela- 
tions to which sensations of other classes may be given that orderly 



\ 



154 The External World 

arrangement which constitutes the difference between a chaos and 
a world. We explain the variations in the visual object, the 
changes in the loudness of a given sound, by a reference to things 
tactual, by the introduction of the notion of distance. It is, per- 
haps, an interesting speculation whether a consciousness without 
such a " core " as I have been discussing could contain a world — 
whether the other classes of sensations could, by direct relations 
to each other, form a system at least analogous to the one we know. 
But whatever may be our conclusions upon this point, we are forced 
to admit that in the system of our experiences the tactual world is 
the very foundation of the whole. It is what we mean by the ob- 
jective ; other elements of our experience are by contrast subjective. 

Such an objective world is recognized by the unreflective. It 
is the world in which I rest when I insist that I see the real desk 
before me as it is and reject the suggestion that I am deluded 
by an empty appearance. I confound sign with thing signified, it 
is true ; but this particular sign gives me the thing so satisfactorily 
that I rest in the thing without being forced to the recognition that 
I am grasping it, so to speak, at one remove. This is the external 
material world of Locke, the world of the primary qualities of 
matter, the world of "solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, 
and number." It is the physical world of matter and motion of 
which science treats. 

It has been intimated in the last chapter that the description, 
which science is in a position to give us, of the mechanism which 
it conceives the physical world to be, is extremely fragmentary 
and incomplete. The ether, the atom, the molecule, these are not 
characters with whose attributes and modes of life we are intimately 
acquainted, and to whom we may assign parts in our drama with an 
unshaken confidence that we are mirroring real life. The doc- 
trines of the eternity of matter and the conservation of energy 
are very broad generalizations made upon but a slender basis of 
observed fact. In the present state of our knowledge, the attempt 
to demonstrate to an unwilling mind that the notion of mechanism 
is not out of place, at least in the realm of the organic, must surely 
be a signal failure. That the world is the mechanism that science 
conceives it to be is rather a matter of faith than of certain knowl- 
edge. To overlook this fact is to misconceive the methods and re- 
sults of scientific research. But, on the other hand, it is well to 
remember that a dogmatic denial that science is right in its guesses 



Significance of the Distinction 155 

at the truth cannot find its justification in the limitations of human 
knowledge. An appeal to our ignorance is not out of place as an 
argument against a hasty and inconsiderate assent or against over- 
confidence. It is out of place as an argument in favor of unquali- 
fied denial. 

In a later chapter I shall discuss the arguments usually urged 
against the scientific view of the mechanism of nature. The 
answer to them may be conveniently deferred until after we 
have seen more clearly w^hat that view is. But here I wish to 
take up and examine at some length a general objection against 
the reality of those things which science regards as the realities 
which make up the external world of things. 

The objection, when fully understood, may be seen to impugn 
the reality, not merely of the world of atoms and molecules actually 
vouched for by science, but also that of any such unseen world which 
the progress of scientific research may hereafter seem to justify us 
in assuming to exist. It is an objection to the validity of the con- 
clusions which may be arrived at by the science of the future, as 
well as an objection to the conclusions arrived at by the science of 
our day. It may be summed up as follows : The real world de- 
scribed by science is, after all, a mere product of the constructive 
imagination. It is not and cannot be a something actually given 
in sensation. Nobody has directly perceived either an atom or a 
molecule, and perhaps nobody ever will. Hence, to call such a 
world the reality, and to reduce to the rank of mere appearance 
the world of things actually given in our experience is absurd. 
It amounts to making the hypothetical and uncertain more real 
than the immediate and the certain. 

This objection seems, at first sight, to be rather plausible. But 
a little reflection makes it evident that it draws its whole force 
from a misconception of the meaning of the word "real." It 
has been pointed out that, when we recognize anything as real, 
we are never confining our attention to the thing itself, but are 
always keeping in view its relation to other elements in our ex- 
perience. This is true whether we are speaking, as ordinary 
mortals, about the things which concern us in common life, or, 
as men of science, about the realities to which science pins its faith. 
To the plain man the real is that which takes its place in a certain 
orderly system which he finds within his experience ; the unreal is 
that which defies such an arrangement. 



156 Tlie External World 

Nor must the expression " which he finds within his expe- 
rience " be misunderstood. The system of experiences which 
constitutes the real world as conceived by the plain man is less 
complicated a construct than that which constitutes the real world 
of the scientist, but it is none the less a construct. It exists in 
large part in the imagination, as we have seen. When we say that 
he finds it, we can only mean that he is not conscious of having 
built it up for himself. What is actually in the sense at any 
moment can constitute but a very small portion of his total real 
world. When such a man first feels the prick of the Pyrrhonic 
doubt, he may hesitate to afBrm that this or that element really 
belongs to the perceived object in which he is interested, and yet 
he cannot but feel that certain members of the class of experiences 
he has come to doubt may seem to him more real than the others. 
For example, it seems to him more reasonable to affirm that a man 
really is as he looks when seen near at hand, than that he is as he 
looks when seen at a distance. The visual experience in question 
is not picked out from the series to which it belongs at mere hap- 
hazard. It is chosen because it is the most helpful in giving fur- 
ther information regarding the system of his experiences. 

When the Lockian distinguishes between the primary and the 
secondary qualities of bodies, he is drawing a distinction of much 
the same kind. He is separating out from the mass of his sensa- 
tional experiences a certain group which can be made to fall into a 
definite and measurable system, and which can serve as a means 
for relating and ordering sensations of every kind. And when the 
scientist passes from the physical world as it seems to be revealed 
to us in sensations of touch and movement to a world of atoms and 
molecules, why is he inclined to regard the latter as the real world 
and the former as the world of appearances? It is because the 
atoms and molecules which he conceives as constituting the masses 
of matter with which his senses seem to make him acquainted help 
to make more complete and comprehensible the mechanism which 
appears to him to be revealed, at least in outline, in his experience 
of things. Their incorporation into the scheme of the universe is 
supposed to explain what has lacked explanation, and to unite our 
experiences into a more perfect system. Their assumption is by 
no means an arbitrary one. It is an extension of our experience 
in thought, and is only justified if it be based upon what is actually 
given. The world of the scientist is the real world, just because 



Significance of the Distinction 157 

it is the completest and the most satisfactory world which we have 
attained to up to the present. 

Thus we see that the word " real " is by no means synonymous 
with " intuitively present in consciousness." The plain man accepts 
as real much that is not immediately given. The Lockian does 
the same. The believer in the existence of ether, atoms, and mole- 
cules follows in their wake. To argue that these things cannot 
be real because they are not immediately given in the sense is 
absurd. What is immediately given in the sense is not sufficient 
to make any one of the real worlds that we have been discussing. 
It is sensations as supplemented by remembered and imagined 
sensations, and thus built into a system that constitute even the 
real world in which I find myself before I have fallen a victim to the 
Pyrrhonic doubt and have set about the task of critical reconstruc- 
tion. What I see of my desk at this moment is not in itself enough 
to constitute a desk, nor can it do so when combined with what 
I actually feel. The reality is always more than is given in the 
sense. It is absurd to say that we should turn our backs upon the 
abstractions of science and find the real world in a return to 
immediate experience. 

We know no such thing as immediate experience of a real 
world, if by immediate experience be meant an experience in which 
the fragmentary consciousness-contents actually in the sense are 
not supplemented by others and assigned a place in a system vastly 
more complex than they are themselves. The difference between 
the real external world as it stands revealed to the plain man and 
the physical world as it is conceived by science is by no means an 
absolute one. In neither case is a given object declared to be real 
simply because it is intuitively present in consciousness. In each 
case we are dealing with a construct, and objects are called real 
when it seems reasonable to assign them a place in that construct. 
In a consciousness too elementary to contain such a system there 
could be no distinction of real and unreal. The reasoning which 
would deny the real existence of the atom on the ground that it 
cannot be directly perceived should, in consistency, deny that the 
moon has more than one side — nay, it should go farther than that, 
and should maintain the existence of no more than the scrap of 
color-sensation which is in the sense when the eyes are directed 
toward the moon. It was because Berkeley inconsistently fell into 
this error and misconceived the true significance of real existence, 



158 The Extmial World 

that lie was forced to save the continuous existence of real things 
by assigning to them an actual existence in a Divine mind between 
the intervals of their perception in Unite minds. 

But if, in view of all this, we maintain that science is justified 
in regarding the world of atoms and molecules as the real world, 
and in reducing to the rank of appearance what is directly given 
in sensation, does it not seem to follow that the only reality left 
us is a hypothetical and uncertain reality which may conceivably 
have no existence at all? Science does not pretend to be infal- 
lible. Its account of the constitution of the ph3'sical world may 
turn out to be — not merely incomplete, for it is admittedly that 
— but fundamentally incorrect. Should this be the case, would we 
be left with no reality ? 

To this I answer: By no means. We have seen that our 
sensations as a whole constitute an interconnected system. A 
sensation is recognized as such because it holds a place in such 
a system. As holding such a place it is real. When, within 
such a system, we distinguish a nucleus which is peculiarly ser- 
viceable in definitely ordering and arranging the whole, certain 
of our sensations take the place of signs and others come to hold 
the more dignified position of thing signified. Here we have the 
distinction between appearance and reality. But the application 
to any given complex of sensations of the term " appearance " does 
not in the least do away with the reality to wliich it may lay 
claim, in that it is a complex of sensations. If it did not belong 
to one system with the thing signified, it could not serve as a 
sign. And when, from tactual things as they seem to the Lock- 
ian to be directly given in the sense, science passes to tactual 
things as they are conceived to be, there is a new distinction be- 
tween sign and thing signified, and a new distinction between 
appearance and reality. Things as they are conceived to be, 
furnish a better explanation of the system of things as a whole, 
and hence they are regarded as more real. If now it be discov- 
ered that science has fallen into error, and that tactual things as 
it conceived them to be, do not render more complete and consist- 
ent the system of our experiences as a whole, the reality of these 
tactual things will have to be repudiated. They must be cast 
out of the S3^stem, and their real existence denied. But in that 
case we are left with the reality we had before we put our faith 
in these things. The system of our experiences remains, to be 



Significance of the Distinction 159 

sure, a very imperfect system, but then we are at liberty to make 
new efforts to render it more complete. The goal towards which 
all such efforts are directed is the attainment of a complete and 
wholly harmonious system. Such a system is what we mean by 
ultimate reality. 

But here we are confronted with a very significant problem. 
Is it within the bounds of possibility that science should attain 
to — not reality, for reality in some sense is attainable even by 
the unscientific — but ultimate reality, a reality which cannot, in 
its turn, be relegated to the subordinate place of appearance ? The 
world is spread out in space. It exists in time. Both space and 
time we conceive to be infinitely divisible, which means that we 
conceive that no portion of either is so small that it is not com- 
posed of portions still smaller. If, then, science rests, let us say, 
in the atom, and takes this for its ultimate unit in the explanation 
of the mechanism of nature, it rests in what cannot be regarded 
as ultimate in any absolute sense of that word. The size of an 
atom appears to be as legitimate an object of investigation as the 
size of a planet. It is not apparent why an investigation into 
the intimate structure of matter, which results in the atom, should 
not be continued as an investigation into the intimate structure 
of the atom itself. How shall we account for the properties of 
the atom, and explain its ability to play the r61e assigned to it 
in the mechanism of nature? That the need for such an exten- 
sion of our knowledge has been felt by students of physical 
science has of late years been made sufficiently evident. 

Again : the description of the changes which take place in the 
physical world we conceive as a description of occurrences in 
time. If time be infinitely divisible, there can theoretically be no 
limit to the degree of minuteness with which such occurrences 
may be described. We may, it is true, describe a series of occur- 
rences roughly by indicating a few of the most striking or of the 
most interesting stages in the process in question. This we do 
when we relate a tale of adventure, or give an account of the 
passing of a procession. But such a description resembles a de- 
scription of the solar system which stops with the sun, the planets, 
and their satellites. It is only the gross anatomy of the machine 
that has been given. The occurrences which we loosely indicate 
we conceive to be made up of, and interconnected by, other occur- 
rences, which in their turn may be analyzed, etc. How can we 



160 The External World 

regard the description at any given stage as ultimate, and as giv- 
ing us a final account of what has really taken place ? 

Space and time are the warp and woof of that "invisible net" 
in which we conceive the real world to have its being. I shall, 
hence, turn to an examination of these, and shall make no apology 
for discussing them at considerable length. 

But before I bring this chapter to a close, it seems necessary 
for me to take up again and to modify, in the light of the fore- 
going, the provisional statement, that a sensation is known to be 
such from the fact that it takes its place among those elements 
of our experience which so connect themselves together as to form 
what we recognize as the system of material things. ^ 

Has it not been shown that a man may recognize a multitude 
of experiences to be sensations, without being compelled to 
regard them as constituents of the external world at all? And 
has it not been shown that he may believe in an external world 
which can never be given as sensation — the unperceived world 
of atoms and molecules? It is clear, then, that the statement 
should be modified. How shall we modify it? 

We must remember that all our scientific constructions are 
based, in the end, on the common experience of things with 
which we are familiar. From this we must set out in every 
attempt to increase our knowledge and to render it more accurate. 
In common life, the things about us are the real things, i.e. the 
real things are constituted by sensational experiences. When the 
plain man distinguished between the faint patch of color, as ap- 
pearance, and the house seen from a nearer point, as reality, both 
appearance and reality are — each in its turn — to be accepted as 
experiences of an external world, and to be regarded as constituted 
by sensational elements. 

Now, when, with the scientist, we come to regard colors, odors, 
tastes, etc., as subjective, and accept a real external world, not 
immediately perceived at all, to which such elements are denied, 
we have passed beyond the relatively simple construction with 
which we stop in common life. But it should be remarked that 
all the elements which enter into this more elaborate construction, 
subjective elements as well as those which represent the supposed 
external reality, hold the same sort of relations to each other that 

1 Chapter VI. 



Significance of the Distinction 161 

are held by the elements that constitute the world as perceived by 
the plain man. 

Let us, then, modify the above-mentioned statement by saying 
that a sensation, to be recognized as such, must belong to the one 
system with the elements in which the world of material things is 
revealed. Even this statement does some injustice to the word 
"sensation," as the reader will see when he comes to Chapter 
XXIII ; but he will then see also, I hope, that I have had good 
reason for using the word " sensation " as I have done in this and 
the three preceding chapters. There seemed to be no better word 
to use. And with this I must leave the subject for the present. 



CHAPTER X 
THE KANTIAN DOCTRINE OF SPACE 

The plain man is apt to think of space as a real something be- 
yond consciousness, in which the material things which he sees and 
feels exist and move. A little questioning reveals clearly that, 
concerning the nature of this something, he has the vaguest ideas. 
It is not matter, and it is not like matter ; but it undoubtedly exists, 
and it is plainly indispensable to the existence of material things. 
He hesitates to afBrm that it may properly be called a '• thing " at 
all ; but, " thing" or not, he is sure that it exists, and believes that 
it would continue to exist even if every material thing were anni- 
hilated. 

Touching some of the properties of this perplexing something, 
however, he regards himself as having very definite bits of infor- 
mation. Space is three-dimensional ; it is homogeneous in all its 
parts ; it is infinite in extent ; every portion of it is infinitely divis- 
ible. It is, in other words, an infinite continuum^ which must be 
granted real existence if the world of matter is to be allowed any 
reality at all, and is not to be reduced to a mere semblance of a 
world, an unreal dream. 

We shall see later that there is much truth, as well as some mis- 
conception, in the plain man's views touching the nature of space. 
One thing we may object to at the outset, and that is the assump- 
tion that space is a something quite beyond consciousness, and 
hence, quite cut off, as reflection shows that all such things must 
be, from the sphere of our knowledge. We would do the geometer 
little good by granting him, as the sphere in which he is to exercise 
his activity, an unknowable, unredeemed by even the gleams of 
meaning which are usually involuntarily allotted to unknowables. 
The plain man stands, as I liave in earlier papers pointed out, upon 
the psychological standpoint, assuming an external world wholly 
cut off from his knowledge, and yet somehow known to him. He 

1G2 



The Kantian Doctrine of Space 163 

has grasped dimly the distinction of subjective and objective, and 
he expresses himself inconsistently. He must not be taken wholly 
at his word. But so much has been said on the absurdity of assum- 
ing a world wholly beyond consciousness and not made of " con- 
sciousness-stuff," that I shall assume that I need not discuss this 
in approaching the subject of space and time. 

I propose to examine, as briefly as I may, the two leading forms 
of doctrine which have been advanced in modern times touching 
the nature of space and time, and which to this day dispute the 
field between them. These I shall call the Kantian and the Berke- 
leian, using these appellations in rather a broad sense to indicate 
types of doctrine, and without meaning to make either philosopher 
responsible for later additions to, or alterations in, the structure 
which he reared upon the foundations that he himself laid down. 

Neither doctrine quite falls into the vulgar error of making 
space and time " things," and neither regards them as " external " 
in the peculiar sense of the word to which I have alluded above. 
In both doctrines space and time are treated as " form " and not as 
"matter," i.e. as the arrangement, the system of relations, which 
obtains between certain contents of consciousness, and not as those 
contents themselves. The two doctrines have a good deal in com- 
mon, but they are, nevertheless, marked by differences of no small 
importance ; and the one which has had the more general acceptance 
precipitates its adherents into difficulties so great and so hopeless 
that it seems surprising that they have not incited to a more wide- 
spread disaffection and a final revolt. This doctrine is the Kantian, 
and to it we will now turn our attention. 

We will first take up Space. According to the Kantian doc- 
trine, our knowledge of space is not a something at which we 
arrive as the result of an elaboration of our experiences. Space is 
not a construct for which our original experiences merely furnish 
the data. It is the necessary " form " of the intuitions of the 
external sense, and is given complete in every such intuition. 
Kant held that : (1) Space is a necessary " form " of thought, and, 
hence, we cannot conceive the possibility of the non-existence of 
space, although we can easily conceive of the non-existence of ob- 
jects in space; (2) we can represent to ourselves but one space, 
of which all spaces are parts ; from which it follows that space 
cannot be conceived as limited ; (3) all space is composed of 
spaces ; that is, space is infinitely divisible, and that which fills 



164 The External World 

space, the " thing " given in sense-intuition, must be infinitely 
divisible, too.^ 

In criticising the Kantian doctrine, it is necessary to distin- 
guish clearly between what may be implied in regarding space 
simply as the " form " of certain intuitive experiences — as the 
'•' formal " element which, in union with the " material " element, 
constitutes these experiences — and what may be supposed to fol- 
low from the assumption that space is a neceasary ''form " of thouglit, 
of such a nature that we are compelled to think space as infinite, 
infinitely divisible, and incapable of being thought as non-existent. 

To make this distinction clear, I will take a concrete instance. 
In looking at the table before me, I am conscious of a complex of 
color-sensations. This Kant would have called a "manifold of 
sense." In this complex I can distinguish between "form" and 
" matter," i.e. between sensational elements and their arrangement. 
I may regard the " form " in my complex as something equally 
original with the "matter," and, if I choose, may attempt to 
account for it by saying that it is due to the nature of the mind — 
that in this way and in no other must the mind arrange its sensa- 
tions of color. Bearing in mind what psychologists tell us about 
the importance of sensations of touch and movement, and the way 
in which other sensations come to stand as signs of these, we may 
amend the above by remarking that we are really concerned with a 
tactual thing for which the visual complex under discussion stands 
as a sign ; but that will not affect the distinction which has been 
drawn between "form" and "matter." We still have to do with 
a complex in which the two elements are distinguishable, and we 
should not forget just what we mean by "form" when we are 
drawing the distinction. It is nothing occult or mysterious. It is 
a certain element in a given experienced content, and nothing else. 
In the given instance, it is the arrangement of the tactual sensa- 
tions which we have in mind when we say that we see the table .^ 

1 "Critique of Pure Reason," Transcendental ^Esthetic, §§ 2, 3, and 4 ; Anti- 
nomies I and II, and Observations. 

2 It will be seen that I treat " form " and " matter" as irreducible elements, as 
does the Kantian. The best argument for the opposite view that I know is con- 
tained in Professor James's " Psychology " (Chapter XX, pp. 149-152), but I do not 
find it wholly convincing. I wish, however, to point out that the argument con- 
tained in these papers in no wise hinges upon the decision given to this question. 
Whether "form" be ultimately distinct from, or identical with, sensation, is 
something one may leave undecided while following ray argument. 



The Kantian Doctrine of Space 165 

But the space given us in such an intuition is limited. It is 
-coextensive with the "matter" of which it is the "form," and is 
not a something which extends beyond it. It is limited because 
the whole complex is limited, and, judging from this experience 
alone, there appears to be no more reason for assuming the formal 
element to be infinitely extended than for assuming the material to 
be so. If I were intuitively conscious of an infinite extent of color 
(or tactual) sensation, I should have an intuition of infinite space 
(the formal element in this experience), for both "form" and 
*' matter " would be limitless. Or if, failing this, I were conscious 
of a certain limited amount of color-sensation, and were, further, 
immediately conscious of a boundless space extending from the 
limits of the bit of space filled by the sensation (assuming that one 
may be conscious of pure space), then, too, I should have an intui- 
tion of infinite space. But to extract an intuition of infinite space 
from the patch of sensation with which I started out is an impos- 
sibility. I can succeed in doing so only by juggling with the 
word "intuition." The statement that infinite space is given in in- 
tuition is palpably absurd when the word " intuition " is taken in its 
strict sense. It does not mean that we have reason to believe that 
space is infinite, nor that we are forced to think that space is infi- 
nite. It means that we are immediately conscious of every part of 
space, as I am conscious of the bit of space within the limits of this 
patch of sensation. Can any one seriously maintain so absurd a 
doctrine ? 

It may, however, be maintained that we have an intuitive 
knowledge of infinite space in a somewhat different sense of the 
word " intuitive." That is, it may be held that we know intuitively 
that space is infinite. This does not mean that we are immediately 
conscious of infinite space, but merely that we know space to be 
infinite, and know it without being compelled to prove it in any 
way. It is a "necessity of thought." An interesting chapter 
might be written on what have commended themselves to the phi- 
losophers of past ages as necessities of thought, revelations of the 
inner light, etc. But I leave this tempting subject, and con- 
tent myself with pointing out that it is a counsel of prudence to be 
oracular regarding necessities of thought, and to advance them 
without attempting to prove that they must be accepted as such. 
Those who have attempted to prove that we must accept the 
infinity of space as a necessity of thought, or as an intuition in 



16G The External World 

the second sense of the word, have offered highly defective evi- 
dence of the fact. " We are," says Hamilton, " altogether unable 
to conceive space as bounded — as finite : that is, as a whole beyond 
which there is no further space." ^ " We find ourselves," echoes 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, " totally unable to imagine bounds beyond 
which there is no space." ^ It is inferred from this that we must 
think of space as infinite. 

But what is it that these philosophers have invited us to 
attempt? When scrutinized, Hamilton's argument is seen to be 
nothing more nor less than this : We are altogether unable to con- 
ceive space as bounded — as finite; that is, as a whole in the space 
beyond which there is no further space. The word " beyond " in his 
argument has no meaning whatever except as it refers to space 
beyond, and Hamilton has simply set up a contradiction for us to 
tilt at. He asks us to imagine a limit, with a space beyond it, and 
at the same time no space beyond it. When we have had a "go " 
at this, and feel low-spirited over the result, he tells us with an air 
of mystery that we are in the clutches of a " necessity of thought." 
Whatever may be said for or against the necessity of thinking 
space as infinite, it is clear that this demonstration is a mere quibble. 
It has been, however, a very popular quibble. 

The doctrine that space is a necessity of thought in such a 
sense that, although we can annihilate in thought all objects in 
space, we cannot conceive the non-existence of space itself — this 
doctrine rests upon a similar misconception. There seems no 
reason at all why, if by space given in intuition we mean only the 
formal element in a given sensational experience, we should not be 
able to think away the space with the " matter " of which it is the 
"form." But we must not set ourselves a contradictory task, and 
erect a theory over our failure to accomplish it. " We can never 
represent to ourselves the non-existence of space," says Kant, 
"although we can easily conceive that there are no objects in 
space." 2 But what does one do when one tries to imagine the 
non-existence of space ? One first clears space of objects, and then 
one tries to clear space of space in somewhat the same way. We 
try to " think space away " as we express it, which does not mean 

1 » Lectures on Metaphysics," XXXVIII. 2 u First Principles," III, § 15. 

' ''Critique of Pure Reason," Transcendental Esthetic, § 2 : " Man kann sich 
niemals eine Vorstellung davon machen, dass kein Raum sei, ob man sich gleich 
ganz wohl denken kann, dass keine Gegenstande darin angetroffen werden." 



1 



The Kantian Doctrine of Space 167 

that we turn all thought of space out of our mind, but that we try 
to think it away as we have thought objects away, by clearing it 
away from something, and having that something left. 

The attempt must, of course, fail; but then it is foolish to 
make the attempt. That this is what is commonly attempted I 
think certain. It is what I did, with a good deal of satisfaction to 
myself, during the years when Kant's position seemed to me well 
taken, and it is what I have an impulse to do now when I read the 
above-cited sentence from the " Critique. " So far as I can learn from 
their own accounts of their experience, it is what others try to do 
when they find it impossible to think space as non-existent. They 
try to annihilate space, and yet keep in mind, so to speak, the 
place where it was. They try to make a Vorstellung of the non- 
existence of space, i.e. to keep before the mind some intuition of 
the external sense, and yet annihilate its " form," which is mani- 
festly self-contradictory. We have here one of the countless 
instances of what may be called " the philosophic fallacy " par 
excellence. It is the special weakness of the philosopher to say " I 
go," and then not go ; to set about abstracting from something, 
and then not abstract from it ; to offer to clear the ground, and 
then to leave an array of stumps which must trip up the feet of 
the unwary. 

The deductions which have been made from these supposed 
necessities of thought are rather startling, and should in them- 
selves, I think, be sufficient to arouse a suspicion of the founda- 
tions upon which they rest. In the proof of the Antithesis of 
his famous First Antinomy, Kant offers an a priori demonstration 
that the sensible world must be conceived of as unlimited in ex- 
tent. To be sure, he also offers what he regards as an equally 
satisfactory proof of the contradictory proposition ; but as readers 
of Kant know, this does not mean that he believes his argument 
to be defective. The argument for the infinitude of the sensible 
world, which he brings forward as logically unexceptionable, is 
as follows : — 

Space is infinite ; hence the sensible world, if it be limited, must 
lie in the infinite void. But space is not an object; it is only 
the " form " of possible objects. Hence space may be limited by 
phenomena, but phenomena cannot be limited by an empty 
space beyond them. It is, therefore, impossible that a void space 
should project beyond the limits of a finite world of sense. The 



168 The External World 

space beyond any given limit must, then, be filled space, and we 
must conceive of the sensible world as infinite in extent. 

It is clear that in this argument Kant plays fast and loose with 
the reality of space. He seems to make it a thing, or something 
like a thing, and yet not precisely a thing. We have seen that 
he regards it as real enough to persist in remaining wlien we 
think away all objects in it. Here we see that he regards it as 
real enough to be limited by phenomena, if it be a space within 
the world of sense, but not as real enough to limit phenomena by 
extending beyond. His argument is, in effect: Space is infinite 
(assumed as an intuition in the second sense of the word) ; it is 
not enough of a thing to exist by itself ; it must, then, be filled in 
with something ; this something must be infinite as space is ; 
ergo^ the world is unlimited. These are scholastic subtleties, and 
it seems odd to me, at least, that they should have been advanced 
by so acute a thinker as Kant ; and yet these reasonings seem to 
appeal to some vigorous minds even in our day. 

It is always safe to be on one's guard against so-called neces- 
sities of thought and the deductions which are drawn from them. 
Those who have elected to regard space as a " necessary form " 
of external intuition, or as a " necessity of thought," may easily 
be misled by these phrases into accepting as self-evident what is 
not merely not self-evident, but is even founded upon very question- 
able reasonings. There is, to be sure, no doubt that the statement 
that space is infinite seems to be a reasonable one even to the man 
who regards it as by no means certain that the universe of matter 
is infinite. What we mean by the statement that space is infinite, 
and why it commends itself as a reasonable one, I shall try to 
make clear later. We shall see that, to explain this general readi- 
ness to regard space as infinite, we are not forced to fall back upon 
such doubtful arguments as the impossibility of thinking a space 
beyond which there is no space, or the impossibility of imagining 
the non-existence of space. 

So much for our intuitive knowledge of space as infinite and 
"indestructible." Intuitions of this kind are no better than the 
fateful horse which brought ruin to Troy. They may be had as 
a gift, and they are big with disaster to those who receive them. 
But if we confine ourselves to intuitions in the first sense of the 
word, may we not escape such difficulties ? In the table which 
I perceive before me, I distinguish " matter " and " form." The 



I 



The Kantian Doctrine of Space 169 

" form " — the system of relations — is as immediately given as the 
"matter." In holding that some space, at least, is directly given 
in intuition we do not, hence, seem to be juggling with the word 
or using it in an ambiguous sense. 

But when we examine more narrowly what is implied in such 
an intuition of space, we are at once confronted with certain vener- 
able difficulties that have exercised the ingenuity of mankind 
almost from the beginning of reflective thought. Space we regard 
as infinitely divisible. Every space, however small, must, then, be 
made up of spaces, never of points. It follows that what fills space 
must also be infinitely divisible. 

Thus every " intuition of the external sense " must be infinitely 
divisible. It cannot be denied that when we divide up into its 
parts any given sense-experience, we speedily come to what appears 
to be no longer composite. A line perceived by sight, for example, 
does not appear to be composed of an infinite number of line- 
portions. Subdivision seems to result in visual points not composed 
of parts. The minimum sensibile, as it has been called, is not di- 
rectly perceived to have part out of part. 

So much is admitted even by those who maintain that we have 
an intuition of space as infinitely divisible. The minimum sensible 
does not present itself in consciousness as " a manifold with its 
parts external to each other." But, says Kant, "since we cannot 
reason from the non-consciousness of such a manifold to the 
absolute impossibility of its existence in any intuition of an object, 
and since it is the latter that is necessary to absolute simplicity, it 
follows that this cannot be inferred from any perception what- 
ever." ^ 

Here Kant has evidently fallen back upon the second sense of 
the word "intuition," even while discussing intuition in the first 
sense. We are not directly conscious of an experience as infinitely 
divisible, but it is assumed that we have an intuition of the fact 
that it is so. As in the case of the infinite extent of space, so in 
the case of its infinite divisibility, the statement that something is 
given in intuition amounts only to saying that we know this or that 
about something. We may well pause before accepting as an in- 
dubitable deliverance of consciousness such a supposed bit of 
knowledge ; we certainly seem justified in asking how we know 
that our experiences of extension are thus infinitely divisible. If 
1 Op cit.t Second Antinomy, Antithesis. 



170 The External World 

we do not immediately perceive them to be infinitely divisible, does 
not our conviction rest upon an inference of some sort? How 
shall such an inference be justified? 

Of course, something may be said for Kant's statement that we 
cannot reason from the non-consciousness of a " manifold " to the 
impossibility of its existence in a given intuition, provided that his 
words be understood with a certain limitation. Some things 
exist in consciousness clearly and definitely, and of some we are 
very indefinitely conscious. It is quite conceivable that a given 
content of consciousness may be composite, and yet may not be 
recognized as such. But it is one thing to affirm that an experience 
in which we do not seem to be able to perceive part out of part 
may really consist of parts ; and it is quite another thing to affirm 
that it must consist of such parts, and that the parts of which it 
consists must in their turn be composite, and so on, ad infinitum. 
The last statement is an exceedingly bold one, and should not be 
allowed to pass without a demand for proof of some sort. Shall 
we accept it as true merely because we are told that it is a " neces- 
sity of thought " ? 

That Kant did not appeal to intuition, in the first sense of the 
word, he has himself made evident. " Against the principle of the 
infinite divisibility of matter," he writes,^ " whose ground of proof 
is purely mathematical, the monadists bring objections, which lay 
themselves open to suspicion from the mere fact that they do not 
admit the clearest mathematical proofs as giving an insight into 
the constitution of space, in so far as this is really the formal con- 
dition of the possibility of all matter. ... If we listen to them, we 
shall have to conceive, not merely the mathematical point — 
which, though simple, is not a part, but only the limit of a space — 
but also physical points, which are likewise simple, but have the 
advantage, as parts of space, of filling space by their mere aggre- 
gation. I shall not here repeat the common and clear refutations 
of this absurdity, which exist in plenty ; for it is wholly in vain to 
try to quibble away the evidence of mathematics by means of 
merely discursive conceptions. I will only remark, that if philos- 
ophy here falls into chicanery in dealing with mathematics, it is 
because he forgets that in this question one is concerned only with 
phenomena and their conditions. It is not enough to find for the 
pure conception of the composite the conception of the simple; 
1 Op. cit., Second Antinomy, ObseiTations on the Antithesis. 



The Kantian Doctrine of Space 171 

for the intuition of the composite (matter) one must find the intui- 
tion of the simple. This is by the laws of our sensibility, and, 
hence, in the case of objects of our senses, wholly impossible." 

Here Kant takes a double position, if I may so express 
it. In the closing words of the extract he falls back upon the 
assertion that the "laws of our sensibility" make it impossible 
that the absolutely simple should be given in intuition. That is, 
he simply invokes the magic of an " intuition " in the second sense 
of the word. But he has admitted, as we have seen, that the simple 
may apparently be given in intuition. He accepts the minimum 
seusibile recognized by Berkeley and Hume before him, merely 
arguing that mathematics furnishes proof that this is a false and 
deceitful minimum, a composite masquerading in the attire of 
simplicity. Kant thus maintains : (1) That what is given in 
intuition must be composite, for, by the law of our sensibility, 
nothing can be given in intuition that is not composite — which 
statement, if we accept it as true, ought to close the whole ques- 
tion; and (2) he argues that it is subversive of mathematics to 
deny the infinite divisibility of what is given in intuition. These 
positions may be met by maintaining: (1) That the statement 
that it is a law of our sensibility that the simple cannot be given 
in intuition is either a baseless assumption, or it is based upon the 
mathematical reasonings to which Kant refers ; and (2) that the 
opposing doctrine is seen to be by no means subversive of mathe- 
matical reasonings, when their significance is clearly understood. 

What may be said upon these points will be considered later. 
Before passing on to this I wish to make clear the difficulties 
above alluded to, which attach to the Kantian doctrine, and which 
should be honestly faced by those who elect to become its adhe- 
rents. It will not do to give them a perfunctory glance, call them 
logical puzzles, and straightway forget them. As we shall see, they 
are deserving of most serious consideration. 



CHAPTER XI 

DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH THE KANTIAN DOCTRINE 

OF SPACE 

More than two thousand years ago, it was argued by Zeno of 
Elea that motion is impossible, on the ground that, since space is 
infinitely divisible, no space, however small, can be passed over by a 
moving body. To go from one place to another, a body would have 
to pass through an unlimited number of intermediate spaces. That 
is, it would have to reach the last term of an unlimited series, which 
is absurd. 

The more clearly this problem is stated, the more evident it 
seems to become that the difficulty is insurmountable. It appears 
to arise out of the very notion of space and of motion in space as 
continuous. "The idea expressed by that word 'continuous,'" 
says Professor Clifford,^ " is one of extreme importance ; it is the 
foundation of all exact science of things; and yet it is so very 
simple and elementary that it must have been almost the first 
clear idea that we got into our heads. It is only this : I cannot 
move this thing from one position to another, without making it 
go through an infinite number of intermediate positions. In- 
finite ; it is a dreadful word, I know, until you find out that you 
are familiar with the thing which it expresses. In this place it 
means that between any two positions there is some intermediate 
position ; between that and either of the others, again, there is 
some other intermediate ; and so on without any end. Infinite 
means without any end. If you went on with that work of count- 
ing forever, you would never get any further than the beginning 
of it. At last you would only have two positions very close 
together, but not the same ; and the whole process might be gone 
over again, beginning with those as many times as you like.'' 

In this extract Professor C'lifPord plays directly into the hand 
of Zeno, although it is no part of his purpose to support the con- 

1 *' Seeing and Thinking," p. 134. 
172 



Kantian Difficulties 173 

tention of that philosopher. He is merely trying to make quite 
clear what we mean by calling space continuous ; and is it not 
generally admitted that space is continuous? But, then, how 
can anything move through space ? The difficulties that beset a 
moving point Clifford has himself admirably exhibited, and again 
without the slightest intention of unduly emphasizing these diffi- 
culties or of denying the possibility of motion. He writes : ^ — 

" When a point moves, it moves along some line ; and you 
may say that it traces out or describes the line. To look at some- 
thing definite, let us take the point where this boundary of red on 
paper is cut by the surface of water. I move all about together. 
Now you know that between any two positions of the point there 
is an infinite number of intermediate positions. Where are they 
all ? Why, clearly, in the line along which the point moved. That 
line is the place where all such points are to be found." 

" . . .It seems a very natural thing to say that space is made 
up of points. I want you to examine very carefully what this 
means, and how far it is true. And let us first take the simplest 
case, and consider whether we may safely say that a line is made 
up of points. If you think of a very large number — say, a 
million — of points all in a row, the end ones being an inch apart, 
then this string of points is altogether a different thing from a line 
an inch long. For if you single out two points which are next 
one another, then there is no point of the series between them ; 
but if you take two points on a line, however close together they 
may be, there is an infinite number of points between them. The 
two things are different in kind, not in degree."'^ 

"... When a point moves along a line, we know that between 
any two positions of it there is an infinite number (in this new 
sense ^) of intermediate positions. That is because the motion is 
continuous. Each of those positions is where the point was at 
some instant or other. Between the two end positions on the line, 
the point where the motion began and the point where it stopped, 
there is no point of the line which does not belong to that series. 
We have thus an infinite series of successive positions of a continu- 
ously moving point, and* in that series are included all the points 

1 Op. cit., pp. 143-144. 2 jj)ict., pp. 146-147. 

^ Professor Clifford has used the word " number" in two senses, a quantitative 
and a qualitative. By number in the latter sense he means simply ' ' unlimited 
units." 



174 The External World 

of a certain piece of line-room. May we say, then, that the line is 
made up of that infinite series of points ? 

" Yes ; if we mean no more than that the series makes up the 
points of the line. But ?io, if we mean that the line is made up of 
those points in the same way that it is made up of a great many 
very small pieces of line. A point is not to be regarded as a part 
of a line, in any sense whatever. It is the boundary between two 
parts." 1 

Surely Zeno would have welcomed all this as directly estab- 
lishing his position. " When a point moves along a line, wc know 
that between any two positions of it there is an infinite number 
. . . of intermediate positions." "Infinite means without any 
end." The positions with which we are dealing are "the succes- 
sive positions of a continuously moving point." Hence, to com- 
plete its motion over any given line whatever, the moving point 
must pass, one by one, an endless series of positions, and must finish 
with the end position. If the moral of this is not that a point can- 
not raove along a line, there is no validity in human reasonings. 

Again : The moving point must take, one by one, the " suc- 
cessive positions " in the series. Even the (conscious or uncon- 
scious) Kantian has his preference in absurdities, and rejects some 
rather than others. Clifford does not conceive the point as in two 
positions at once, or as making some ingenious flank movement by 
means of which it can " scoop in " a whole stretch of line simul- 
taneously. It must move along the line, from end to end, taking 
one position at a time, and taking them in their order. It cannot 
make jumps, and are not the positions "successive"? Its path 
seems clearly marked out for it — a smooth road, and without turn- 
ings. Alas ! the line is " continuous." The point cannot take 
successive positions, for have we not seen that no position can 
immediately succeed any other on a continuous line ? " Between 
any two positions there is some intermediate position ; between 
that and either of the others, again, there is some other interme- 
diate; and so on icithout any end^ Can any living soul conceive 
the gait that must be adopted by a point, which must move contin- 
uously (without jumps ?) over a line, and yet is debarred from 
passing from any one position to the next in the series? It cannot 
pass first to some position which is not the next, and then get 
around to the next after a while. That is palpably absurd. And 

1 Op. clL, pp. 149-150. 



Kantian Difficulties 175 

it cannot pass to the next at once, for there is no next. I can 
imagine the shade of Zeno rubbing its hands over this development 
of his doctrine. " The way for a point to get on," says Clifford, 
"is for it never to take the next step." " Of course that means," 
adds Zeno, with ghostly laughter, "that a point cannot get on 
at all." 

And what shall we say to the statement that, although " all the 
points of a certain piece of line-room" are included in the "in- 
finite series of successive (^sic) positions of a continuously moving 
point," yet the line is not made up of these points, but is made 
up " of a great many very small pieces of line " ? What are these 
small pieces of line, which are to be distinguished from the whole 
series of points ? They are not material things, for we are not 
now discussing a bit of string or a chalk-mark, but we are dis- 
cussing a geometrical line, an aspect of space. What lies between 
any two points on the line ? More points for one thing. What 
else? Bits of line. But what are bits of line? When a point 
has moved over a line, has it done anything but pass through a 
series of successive positions ? It seems reasonable, at first sight, 
to assume that such a series of positions is what we mean by a 
line. We are informed, however, that a point is not to be re- 
garded as part of a line in any sense whatever. It is " the boun- 
dary between two parts." Does the assumption of these bits of 
line, which are not positions, but lie between positions, make 
more comprehensible the motion of a point over a line ? 

Manifestly not. If the bits of line could be supposed to take 
up some of the line-room in such a way as to reduce the number 
of points, they might be of some help, but no one supposes them 
to do this. Bits of line or no bits of line, the moving point must 
occupy successively all the positions in an infinite series. And 
if we turn our attention from the points, and confine it to the bits 
of line, we are no better off. If the number of points is endless, 
so is the number of bits of line, for these separate the points, 
which are only their boundaries, and we are forced to ask our- 
selves how an endless series of bits of line can come to an end in 
a last bit which completes the line. It is not a whit easier to 
conceive of a given finite line as composed of bits of line, than it is 
to conceive of it as composed of points, if we once admit that the 
line in question is infinitely divisible. We have only added a new 
element of mystification. What do we mean by these mys- 



176 The External World 

terious bits of line ? Has the point which is passing over a series 
of positions anything whatever to do with them? Do they really 
separate the positions, so that they must be jumped in getting 
along the series, or does the point, after all, meet nothing but 
positions^ never that which separates them? 

The attempt is sometimes made to avoid the difficulty of as- 
suming that a point moving over a line can progressively exhaust 
an infinite series, by laying much emphasis upon the fact that the 
members of the series are exceedingly small, and can be passed 
over with great rapidity. Infinitesimal spaces, it is argued, are 
passed over in infinitesimal times, and all these infinitesimals are 
included in the finite space and time of the motion. But it must 
be evident to any one capable of the least clearness of thought 
that dwelling upon the size of the members of the series, in the 
case either of space or of time, is wholly wide of the mark. 
Whether things are big or little, if the supply of them be truly- 
endless, one can never get to the end of the supply. The rapidity 
with which the terms of the series are exhausted has obviously 
no effect in facilitating an approach to that which cannot, by 
hypothesis, exist, i.e. to a final term. The proposed solution of 
the problem rests upon the implicit assumption that, provided 
only things are small enough, it is legitimate to reason about 
them in an incoherent way, and to make self-contradictory state- 
ments. I know of no way in which this assumption can be de- 
fended, unless it be by claiming that it is an " intuition." 

If, then, in order to move a body, I must reach the end of an 
endless series, I may reasonably conclude that I cannot move a 
body. This is as clear as it is possible for anything to be. No 
exception can be taken to Zeno's argument, if the assumption 
upon which it rests be once granted. One is not at liberty to 
admit that there are difficulties connected with the statement that 
a point can move along an infinitely divisible line, and to hold 
that, in spite of these difficulties, the statement should be ap- 
proved as being the least objectionable that can be made touching 
the subject. One should bear in mind that this amounts to saying 
that what is flatly self-contradictory and, hence, intrinsically- 
absurd, is at least less objectionable, as an article of faith, than is 
something else. I wish to emphasize the fact that no opposing 
doctrine, try as it may, can possibly be worse. At best it can only 
succeed in being as bad. 



Kantian Difficulties 177 

The difficulties arising out of the doctrine of the infinite divisi- 
bility of finite spaces have been so long before the philosophic 
public that it is tired of them, and its sense has grown deadened 
to their significance. They are recognized ; they arouse a fugitive 
interest ; they are made to yield a favorable occasion for a pleas- 
ing exercise of the ingenuity, and then they are put back again 
into their box and their existence is ignored. They are not taken 
seriously, and the serious interest with which the ancients ap- 
proached them is even characterized as pathologic. But whether 
we face them or not, the difficulties are there just the same. 
They do not become non-existent merely because they are over- 
looked ; and it is surely a crying disgrace to human reason that 
a theory of the nature of space should complacently be accepted 
as truth, which admittedly runs into unresolved self-contradic- 
tions. So important is it that the reader should clearly realize 
what is implied in the Kantian doctrine, that I will beg his indul- 
gence while I set forth a rather interesting bit of reasoning, the 
sole defect in which is that it rests upon the assumption contained 
in that doctrine. It is, in all other respects, beyond criticism. 

Let us suppose a point A moving uniformly over a finite line 
he, at such a rate that it will complete the distance in one second. 

})A . 1 1 1 \c 



Since the motion is uniform, the point will pass over one-half 
of the line in half a second ; it will pass over one-half of the re- 
mainder, or one-fourth of the line, in a quarter of a second, etc. 
When the point has passed over the whole line, it will have com- 
pleted the descending series : |^, ^, J, Jg . . . 0. 

We may set aside for the present purpose the " difficulties " 
connected with the point's getting a start along an infinitely 
divisible line, and with the completion of an endless series in 
general. We will accept it as a fact that the line is infinitely 
divisible and can be passed over, in an infinitely divisible second, by 
a point moving at a uniform rate. All these are good Kantian 
assumptions. It seems to follow rigorously that both the line 
and the second are exhausted as our descending series indicates, 
and that both come to an end only when the series is terminated. 
The motion can be completed ; the second can be completed ; the 
series can be completed. In fact, all three are completed simul- 



178 The External World 

taneously. In the case, then, of a point moving uniformly over 
a finite line, we have evidence of the fact that an infinite descend- 
ing series, such as J, i? i? ^e • • • ^' ^^" ^^» ^"^ ^^' completed. 

Now let us suppose a circular disk set revolving around its 
centre, in the plane of this paper, in such a manner that, at the 
first revolution, a point P on its circumference is carried around 
to the place at which it was before in half a second, at the second 
revolution, in a quarter of a second, at the third, in an eighth of 
a second, etc. It is clear that at the end of one second from the 
beginning of the motion the disk will be revolving with infinite 
rapidity, or, in other words, the time of P's revolution will be 
reduced from half a second to zero. We have here a descending 
series of exactly the same kind as the one we had above ; the 
times taken up by the successive revolutions are J, |, ^, ^^g 
... 0. 

Thus, when the disk is revolving with infinite rapidity, there is 
no time at all between P's leaving the place at which it was and 
coming back to it again ; which means, if it means anything, that 
P is always at the same place. But, since similar reasoning will 
apply to any other position through which P is supposed to pass 
in each of its revolutions (for the interval between its leaving that 
position and returning to it again is reduced to zero by the com- 
pletion of the series), we can prove just as cogently that P is in 
the whole series of positions all the time. We can prove, in other 
words, that when the disk revolves with infinite rapidity, P is 
always all around the disk at once. 

I suggest this argument to those who incline to the at present 
rather unfashionable scholastic notion that the whole soul is simul- 
taneously in all parts of the body — tota in toto et tota in utraque 
parte. It may be used as a new weapon of defence, and has the 
advantage of being based upon principles admitted by their 
antagonists. If there be any truth in the Kantian doctrine of the 
infinite divisibility of space and time, why should not the soul be 
thus ubiquitous ? It has only to move fast enough and it may 
succeed in being everywhere at once. The trick is simple — let 
it reduce to zero the time between its setting out from a given 
spot and its getting around to it again. It will, then, never be 
away from that spot, and it will also always be at every other spot 
in the line of its vibration. 

To those who find repugnant the thought of this midge's dance 



Kantian Difficulties 179 

of the soul through all parts of the body, I suggest that there is 
nothing in this doctrine to prevent one from believing that through 
it all the soul retains the quiet seat in the pineal gland assigned it 
by Descartes. There it remains, like a spider at the centre of its 
web ; and one can rest one's mind by thus conceiving it. On the 
other hand, in those heroic moods in which the philosopher loves 
to emphasize the magic powers which distinguish mind from matter, 
independence of space and what not, one can reflect upon the storm 
and stress of its inconceivable motion, — a motion which appears to 
resemble rest, and yet is its extremest opposite ; a motion which 
consists in being at rest in every place and in no place simulta- 
neously. Then one can proudly maintain that, though the soul be 
in the pineal gland, it is not imprisoned there, like an impotent 
lump of matter, hemmed in by the walls of its cell, and unable to 
break through them. It is there, as it is everywhere, by its own 
tireless energy — there and not there, there and everywhere, a 
standing miracle, a living contradiction. 

The topic is one upon which an enthusiast might dilate ; but 
even enthusiasm should not be allowed to run into injustice, 
and the mention of matter reminds me that, for the Kantian, 
matter, too, may have its magical properties. We began with a 
revolving disk, and found that a point upon its circumference may 
be, under certain conditions, all around the disk at once. But if 
this be so, it must be possible for a material particle in the tire of 
a revolving wheel to be all around the wheel at once, when the 
wheel is revolving with infinite rapidity, and, thus, to occupy the 
same space with all the other particles in its path. Is this a new 
insight into the constitution of matter? Shall we say that every 
particle of matter excludes from the space it occupies every other 
particle when, and only when, its motion is not too rapid? Or 
shall we say that, although it is conceivable that an infinite series 
may be completed by a point moving along a line, yet it is not 
conceivable that an infinite series can be completed by the revo- 
lutions of a disk ? Is it an " intuition " that there is this difference 
between moving points and revolving disks ? 

But, it is objected, all this is sheer nonsense ; no point can 
possibly be in more than one position at one time, nor is it possi- 
ble that a point should move so rapidly as always to remain in 
the same spot. I answer : Of course it is sheer nonsense ; but I 
insist that the whole nonsensical edifice rests upon the one nonsensical 



180 The External World 

aifsumption that an endless series can he compltted hij a progress 
which results in the attainment of a final term. This is the as- 
sumption to which his peculiar views of the infinite divisibility of 
space and time force the Kantian. Grant this assumption and the 
rest follows of itself. The reasoning contains no other error. Its 
steps, briefly stated, are as follows : — 

1. If finite spaces and times are infinitely divisible, a point 
moving uniformly over a finite line, must be able to pass through 
an endless series of positions and arrive at the very end. 

2. The total space and time of the motion may be so divided 
as to be truly represented by the descending series, |^, |^, ^, Jg- 
. ..0. 

3. If it is possible for one such series to be completed, there 
is absolutely no reason for affirming that another series of exactly 
the same kind may not be. 

4. Hence, if it is conceivable that a disk may complete one 
revolution upon its centre in half a second, the next in a quarter 
of a second, etc., there is no reason for affirming that it is theo- 
retically impossible for it to attain such a rate of speed that the 
time of its revolution will be reduced to zero. 

5. When it is thus reduced to zero, it is clear that there is no 
time whatever during which a point upon the circumference of 
the disk is away from the position in which it was at the begin- 
ning of the motion, etc. 

I beg the reader to remark that there is absolutely no ground 
for discriminating against the disk in the mere fact that it is 
impossible to define intelligibly the last term in the series of its 
revolutions. It is important to grasp this clearl}^, for the super- 
ficial thinker is apt to delude himself with the reflection : We can, 
at least, know where the point that has exhausted the line is at 
the close of the second ; but no man can make clear what the 
point on the disk is doing at the close of the second. 

It is, however, easy to show that the final term is not a whit 
more difficult of definition in the one case than in the other, and 
that our partiality for the line is due to a mere blunder. In the 
one case we ask ivhere the point is^ a question which is answered, 
not by an appeal to our infinite series, but by a recourse to the 
tape measure ; a question which may be answered perfectly well 
by the opponent of the Kantian, who repudiates the infinite divisi- 
bility of finite lines. In the other case we ask ivhat the nature 



Kantian Difficulties 181 

of the final term is, a question which cannot but be highly embar- 
rassing to the Kantian, in view of the fact that he cannot admit 
that there is a final term, and yet cannot get on without one. Let 
us in each case ask the same question. This is simple justice, for it 
is my whole contention that the behavior of the point on the disk 
is in no respect more reprehensible than that of the point on the line. 

We will, then, inquire into the nature of the final term in each 
series ; what is happening in the last fraction of the second in the 
one case and in the other ? " My dear man," insists the Kantian, 
" there is no final term, and there is no last fraction of the second ; 
space and time are continuous.''^ To this I must answer: Has not 
the point passed over the whole line? Did it do it all at once, or 
bit by bit? No two bits, small or great, can be disposed of at once. 
And is not the second past ? Did it pass as a unit, or bit by bit ? 
Can two points in time be simultaneous ? There was a beginning 
of the motion and an end ; there was a beginning and an end of 
the second. Something must have come last. We will talk about 
that something. 

Now, what is the point on the disk doing at the very close of 
the second ? It cannot be describing a circle, in the usual sense of 
the words, for we are considering the last term in the series, the 
last fraction of the second. The last fraction cannot be composed 
of parts, or it would not be the last ; there would be one half as 
big after it. To describe a circle a point must be in successive 
positions in successive instants, and here we have not successive 
instants. On the other hand, the point cannot be at rest, as the 
words are commonly understood. Is it not the law of the series 
that, with each succeeding term, the point will double the rapidity 
of its motion ? Is there anything in the nature of space and time 
to warrant us in assuming that, at a given instant, doubling the 
rapidity of a point's motion will bring the point to rest ? 

But what is the other point doing in the same final fraction of 
the second ? Is it moving ? There is no time to move in, for this 
fraction has no parts. Is the point exhausting the final bit of line ? 
Surely not that ; it cannot be concerned with a bit of line, in any 
proper sense of the words, for every bit of line must, by hypothesis, 
be composed of parts, and so long as we have before us a some- 
thing with parts we are not occupying ourselves with a final term ; 
there is still room for a term half as big. Is our point, then, 
" exhausting " a mere point ? We are told that a point cannot 



182 The External World 

in any way contribute to the length of a line ; and, if this be so, 
our final term forms no part of the point's path — it does not add 
what was lacking. Besides, our final term must be half the size 
of the term preceding, and what sort of a bit of line is it that is 
made up of two mathematical points ? 

We cannot, therefore, admit the right of the Kantian to repudi- 
ate the timeless motion of that depressing disk on the mere ground 
that it is in its nature an absurdity. The Kantian accepts, as we 
have seen, many absurdities. The disk is in the last fraction of the 
second as sensibly occupied as is the point that moves along a line. 
In each case we are contemplating what is absurd and inconceiv- 
able, and there is not the toss of a copper between them. 

The conclusions of these reasonings will doubtless seem to 
many persons highly unpalatable. There is, however, but one 
way to avoid them, and that is to repudiate the foundations upon 
which they rest. Perhaps I should amend this statement by saying 
there is only one logical way to avoid them. Practically, of course, 
we can avoid them by turning our minds from the whole subject, 
and this is what is commonly done. The unpleasant conse- 
quences of philosophic reasonings may be put to rout by an enemy 
who has not borrowed his arms from Aristotle or from his succes- 
sors. "I dine," writes Hume,^ "I play a game of backgammon, 
I converse, and am merry with my friends ; and when, after three 
or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, 
they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot 
find it in my heart to enter into them any further." In such a 
mood logical difficulties are not taken seriously, and the mind 
drifts upon the stream of its habitual associations. 

It is worthy of remark that such moods are by no means ex- 
clusively the result of relaxation and conviviality. An attachment 
to the doctrines of this or of that school of thought, doctrines to 
which we have grown accustomed, and which seem to place at 
least some sort of ground under our feet; the agreeable sense 
that we belong to a party, and are not groping our way alone in 
the maze of speculations which confronts the philosopher ; these 
things, and such as these, may disincline us to take seriously even 
the most serious of difficulties. We choose to jolt our way along 
upon the old road, even over an occasional self-contradiction. It 
seems better than to seek a smoother track, which is little fre- 
1 "Treatise of Human Nature," Book I, Part IV, § 7. 



I 



Kantian Difficulties 183 

quented, and which may, for all we know, lead anywhere or no- 
where. Accordingly, we take up an exposition of the inconsistencies 
which arise out of the Kantian doctrine, read it through, indulgently 
compliment the author upon his " acuteness," and, feeling unable 
to point out any actual flaw in his argument, we take our stand 
upon what may be called the platform of the liberal-conservative 
in philosophy, saying: "There are undoubtedly difficulties con- 
nected with the doctrine of the infinite divisibility of finite spaces, 
but the way to avoid these difficulties is not to repudiate what is 
undoubted truth, and to take refuge in a shallow empiricism," etc. 
Although the occasioning cause may be different, our attitude of 
mind is distinctly Humian. 

Before closing this discussion of the Kantian doctrine of space, 
I must comment briefly upon one attempt to avoid the enormities 
we have been passing in review, which does not repudiate the 
doctrine of the infinite divisibility of finite spaces, and which yet 
does not simply avert its eyes from the painful consequences of the 
doctrine. This attempt consists in maintaining that we are not 
bound to hold that every finite space consists of an infinite number 
of finite spaces, for space is infinitely divisible not infinitely divided. 

This quibble — for although it has a venerable history, it is 
nothing more — need not detain us very long. We have only to 
ask how it helps us in the case of the moving point. The line 
over which the point has moved is infinitely divisible. What does 
this mean ? We call a line divisible, because we believe that it 
can be divided ; and we believe that it can be divided (theoreti- 
cally of course), because it is composed of parts. If we did not 
believe it to be composed of parts, we should not regard it as 
divisible. By saying that the line is infinitely divisible, we mean 
simply that it is composed, not of a limited, but of an unlimited 
number of parts ; and by saying that the motion of a point over 
it is continuous, we mean that the point must take successively 
an infinite series of positions. Now our point has completed its 
progress; it is at the end of the line. Has it, or has it not, 
passed over every part of the line ? Has it, or has it not, been 
successively in an endless series of positions? It is trivial to 
raise the question whether the parts of the line, the positions 
along it, have been counted or not. If the line is infinitely divis- 
ible, and if the point moves along it, it evidently comes to the end 
of an endless series at every step of its progress. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE BERKELEIAN DOCTRINE OF SPACE 

It is clear from what was said in my last paper that the Kan- 
tian doctrine is a house divided against itself, and that, unless we 
elect to embrace the motto : credo quia absurdum est — a motto not 
now in fashion in most departments of human knowledge — we are 
under obligations either to modify it or to repudiate it altogether. 

What shall we do? Shall we maintain that space is not infi- 
nitely divisible ? If we have the temerity to do this, we shall find 
drawn up against us, not merely the philosophers, but with them 
a formidable array of those who, like Clifford, care not a doit for 
philosophers, but hold very definite notions regarding points, lines, 
surfaces, and solids, and express these opinions with much em- 
phasis. The mathematician usually takes little interest in such 
distinctions as that between " intuition " and " conception " ; but 
he insists strenuously that it is absurd to maintain that a surface 
may be so narrow that, when split longitudinally, it is divided 
into two lines; or a line so short that, when bisected, it yields 
only a brace of points. Mathematics, he affirms, can recognize no 
such lines or surfaces. 

And in this the mathematician is entirely in the right. The 
space with which he is concerned is infinitely divisible ; his solids 
do not split up into surfaces, his surfaces into lines, and his lines 
into points. But, then, he is not dealing with a space immediately 
given in intuition ; he is dealing with real space. He has passed 
from sign to thing signified, without remarking the distinction be- 
tween them, and though this distinction may not greatly concern 
him when he remains on his own ground, it is one of the utmost 
moment to the metaphysician. Indeed, it is just the failure to 
recognize it that has introduced into the Kantian doctrine the in- 
consistencies previously discussed. That doctrine is so near to the 
ti'uth that it needs but a little modification to make it quite satis- 
''"•fory. This I must try to make clear. 

184 



The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 185 

We have seen that Kant held that every object of intuitioa 
must consist of part out of part, whether we can prove it to be so 
constituted or not. " All intuitions," he maintains elsewhere in 
the "Critique,"^ "are extensive quantities." "By an extensive 
quantity," he explains, " I mean one in which the representation 
of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole (and 
hence, necessarily antecedes this). I cannot represent to myself 
any line, however small, without drawing it in thought, i.e, from 
a point generating all its parts successively, and thus alone pro- 
ducing the intuition. So it is also in the case of every, even 
the smallest, portion of time. In it I represent to myself only the 
successive progress from moment to moment, and this, by the 
addition of all the bits of time QZeittheile)^ finally begets a deter- 
minate quantity of time. Since the pure intuition in all phenom- 
ena is either of space or of time, every phenomenon, as intuition, 
is an extensive quantity, for it can only be cognized in apprehen- 
sion through the addition of part to part. Hence all phenomena 
are intuited as aggregates, as consisting of a multiplicity of previ- 
ously given parts. This is not the case with quantities of every 
description, but only with those that are represented and appre- 
hended by us as in their nature extensive quantities." 

The reader of the preceding chapter will find in this passage a 
good deal to object to. To represent to myself any line, however 
small, I must produce it bit by bit ; I must successively add all its 
parts. How many of these parts are there ? An endless number. 
And are these bits of line ready to hand, or must they be pro- 
duced " from a point " ? And what is meant by a " successive prog- 
ress from moment to moment " ? Are moments indivisible, or are 
they bits of time ? Evidently the latter. They, in turn, then, 
are a problem, and must be obtained as the result of an endless 
addition of parts. The successive addition of portions of space and 
of time seems simple only when one forgets for the moment that 
one is a Kantian. 

That is what Kant has done here ; he makes space and time out 
of spaces and times, but he leaves us wholly in the dark as to how 
those bits of space and time that we are to piece together come into 
being. There is a leap from a point — and they somehow appear; the 
rest is simple. But we must not ask how we " drew " the first bit 
of line, or how we " begat " a moment. Moreover, if all phenomena 

1 " Critique of Pure Reason," Transcendental Logic, Axioms of Intuition. 



186 The External World 

are "cognized in apprehension through the addition of part to 
part," or " intuited as aggregates," how about the minimum sensi- 
hile^ which is inferred to have parts, although we cannot perceive 
it to be composed of such? Do we "intuit" this as an aggregate, 
even wliile it seems to us to be simple? 

But I must not dwell upon these inconsistencies, for they have 
been sufficiently discussed already. In the division of the " Critique " 
from which I have just been quoting, Kant again makes it evident 
that he is led to take the unfortunate position that he does take, by 
the supposed necessity of avoiding a clash with mathematical doc- 
trine. " Empirical intuition," he writes, " is only made possible 
by pure intuition — that of space and time. Hence what geometry 
says of the latter will indisputably apply to the former. Such 
evasions as the statement that objects of sense do not conform to the 
rules of construction in space (to the principle of the infinite divisi- 
bility of lines and angles, for example) must fall to the ground. 
For such evasions deny to space, and with space to mathematics as 
a whole, objective validity ; and one no longer knows why and to 
what extent the mathematics can be applied to phenomena." 

Here we have the very nerve of the dispute. Are we to repudi- 
ate mathematical reasonings, or, what seems as bad, to deny their 
applicability to the things of which the senses give us information ? 
Surely not. But are we, then, to accept the infinite divisibility of 
what is given in intuition, and must we, to avoid giving offence to 
the mathematician, shut our eyes and bolt the inevitable conse- 
quences of such an admission ? It is pathetic to hear those who 
feel within them the pangs of the antinomial colic murmur with 
resignation : " There are, indeed, difficulties," etc. 

It is a relief to find that we are not, in fact, shut up to these al- 
ternatives. Kant himself has recognized a distinction which, when 
its significance is clearly seen, enables us to avoid disaster in either 
direction. The passage in the " Critique," which I have in mind 
in saying this, is so interesting that I shall quote it at length : ^ — 

" We are accustomed to distinguish in phenomena what be- 
longs essentially to the intuition of them, and is valid for every 
human sense-faculty, from what belongs to them only accidentally, 
inasmuch as it is not valid in relation to the faculty of sense taken 
generally, but only in relation to a particular disposition or organi- 
zation of this or that sense. Knowledge of the first sort gives us, 
1 *' Critique of Pure Reason," General Remarks on Transcendental ^Esthetic. 



The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 187 

we say, the object as it is in itself ; knowledge of the second gives 
us only the object as it appears. But this distinction is merely 
empirical. If we adhere to this position (as is commonly done), 
and do not regard the former empirical intuition (as one should) 
as, in its turn, mere phenomenon, in which nothing that belongs 
to the thing-in-itself is to be found, we lose our transcendental 
distinction, and we believe that we are cognizing things in them- 
selves ; whereas, on the contrary, everywhere in the world of sense, 
even in our profoundest investigations into the objects which belong 
to that world, we are dealing with nothing but phenomena. 

" Thus we call the rainbow a mere appearance or phenomenon 
in a sunny shower, and we call the rain the thing-in-itself. This is 
right enough, if we take those words in a mere physical sense, and 
mean by the thing-in-itself that which, in universal experience, and 
in all its various relations to the senses, is constituted in intuition in 
just this way and in no other. But if we take this empirical expe- 
rience generally, and, without inquiring into its harmony with the 
faculty of sense of every human being, ask whether this represents 
an object in itself (not the raindrops, for they, as phenomena, are 
evidently empirical objects) — if we do this, we find that the ques- 
tion of the relation of the representative to its object is a transcen- 
dental one, and that not only are the drops mere phenomena, but 
even their globular form, nay, the very space through which they 
fall, all are nothing in themselves, but are mere modifications or 
fundamental dispositions of our sensuous intuition. The transcen- 
dental object remains unknown to us." 

This "transcendental object" is, of course, the "external 
reality " which has so often been assumed to exist beyond con- 
sciousness, and with which I am not concerned in these chapters. 
In this passage of the "Critique," as in many others, Kant comes near 
to repudiating it altogether. He sees that the distinction we all 
draw between appearance and reality does not necessitate any 
reference to such a thing as this, but is a distinction within our 
experience, and has to do only with phenomena, in the broad sense 
of that word. One experience (the rainbow) is taken as the sign 
of another (the falling drops) ; the sign is recognized as appear- 
ance, while the thing signified takes on the dignity of the reality. 
This is quite in harmony with the doctrine coming to be accepted, 
I think, by an increasing number of philosophers, namely, that 
when we are contrasting in our experience appearance and reality. 



188 The External World 

the reality always means to us that upon which we lay the duty of 
ordering and explaining our experiences as a whole. 

Unhappily, Kant did not see the full significance of this dis- 
tinction. He might, after showing in what sense the rainbow is 
not the reality, but only the sign of it, have gone on to show that 
each raindrop, as visual-appearance, is sign of a reality known to 
us in terms of touch and motion. Having arrived at this pointy 
he might have indicated that this reality, in its turn, is relatively 
and not absolutely real ; i.e, that what is actually given in sense 
or imagination (the intuition) may in its turn become sign or 
appearance of something else, which thus becomes, relatively to it, 
the reality. As it is, he assumes that there is given in intuition a 
last " appearance," which is the reality, not in a relative, but in an 
absolute and final sense, and to which the " rules of construction in 
space " directly apply in all their rigor. He fails to see that here, 
as before, he is dealing with a symbol, and out of his confusion of 
symbol and thing symbolized spring the difficulties exhibited above. 

The doctrine which I have called the Berkeleian avoids these 
difficulties, without, I think, giving up anything that the Kantian 
need care to retain. It merely distinguishes more carefully 
between symbol and thing symbolized, and refuses to be led 
into needless perplexities by the assumption of " necessary forms " 
of intuition and supposed inferences from them. Its argument 
may be set forth briefly as follows : — 

1. In a given experience of which I am intuitively conscious 
— say, an expanse of color-sensation — I can distinguish between 
" matter " and " form," between the stuff of my experience and its 
arrangement. 

2. I perceive the expanse of color to be composite, and to be 
divisible into parts, but I do not perceive it to be composed of an 
infinite number of parts, i.e. to be infinitely divisible ; so much 
Kant has himself admitted. 

3. It is important to bear in mind, however, that no such single 
experience constitutes what we mean by a " real thing," nor is its 
"form" what we mean by "real space." We have here only the 
raw materials out of which real things and real space are built up. 
Our experiences fall together into an orderly system, and single 
experiences serve as signs of other experiences or of whole groups 
of such. Thus the little patch of color-sensation that represents a 
tree seen at a distance, and the larger patch that represents a tree 



The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 189 

seen near at hand, are recognized as belonging to the same group, 
and are regarded as different experiences of the same thing ^ i.e. the 
one can stand for the other, and each serves as a sign of the 
"tactual" tree in which the mind rests as the real thing of which 
each is an appearance. 

4. But a little reflection makes it apparent that it is a mistake 
to suppose that this real thing, of which the whole series of visual 
appearances are signs, is a single intuitive experience of any sort. 
The tactual thing, as it exists in the sense or the imagination, is 
the temporary resting-place of our thought, not its permanent goal. 
Science conceives the tree to be made up of atoms and molecules, 
imperceptible to the sense, and yet really existing and furnishing 
an explanation of what is given in the sense. Of this " reality " 
the tree over which I pass my hand becomes an "appearance." 
And if we are justified in thus passing from what is given in the 
senses, to what science compels us to accept as furnishing its 
explanation, a path is opened up to us to which we cannot arbi- 
trarily set a limit. The real thing, in any but a relative sense, be- 
comes to us a possibility of substitutions according to a definite prin- 
ciple ; it is not a single intuitive experience of any sort whatever. 

5. If we will hold this clearly in mind, we may avoid anti- 
nomial pitfalls without either tilting against mathematics, or shock- 
ing the common sense of mankind by denying that space, and lines 
and angles in space, are infinitely divisible. Berkeley pointed out 
long ago that we cannot continue to subdivide a given finite line 
(the line, that is, as given in a single intuition) indefinitely. We 
soon come to what appears to the sense to be a mere point, and to 
have no part out of part. He rightly indicated that when we talk 
of subdividing that which seems to the eye a mere point we are in 
imagination substituting for that a line, which is, of course, composed 
of parts, and we are continuing our subdivision upon this substitute. 

When we realize that this system of substitutions is typical of 
our whole experience of the real world, which reveals itself in con- 
sciousness as a system of interrelated experiences, we can under- 
stand why the infinite divisibility of extended things should be so 
earnestly insisted upon. The point which appears to result from 
the subdivision of a line can be approached to the eye, and it is 
seen as a short line. When a further subdivision has taken place, 
and no change of position will reveal it as a line, we can place a 
microscope over it. 



100 The External World 

111 all this we conceive ourselves to be dealing with the same 
thing, and so we are, in a very important sense of the word same. 
But it is a very unfortunate error to suppose that any one of the 
experiences which represents to us the real thing is the same with 
any other in a quite different sense of the word — to suppose, 
namely, that they are strictly identical. Unless we happen to be 
psychologists, we are not concerned with any one of the experi- 
ences in itself considered. We are concerned with the real thing, 
of which any single experience is a mere symbol. It is quite pos- 
sible for the psychologist to maintain that any single experience is 
probably ultimately divisible into a limited number of sensational 
elements not themselves further divisible ; and yet to maintain 
stoutly that the real thing is to be conceived as infinitely divisible. 
He has only to distinguish carefully symbol from thing symbolized. 

6. Thus we see that, although the geometer finds his raw 
materials in intuition, he uses these raw materials only as his point 
of departure. If lines and angles were not given in intuition, and 
if we could not subdivide these in individual experiences, the geo- 
metrical refinements which have grown out of such experiences 
would be impossible. But these refinements have, be it remem- 
bered, grown out of the experiences ; they are not identical with the 
experiences themselves. 

For example, a fine line upon the paper before my eye seems to 
me to have length, but no breadth. I can divide it in such a way 
that the two resulting portions seem to me to be exactly equal to 
each other. I can form an angle out of two such lines, and can 
draw a third line in such a way that it seems to bisect the angle 
exactly. But the mathematician informs me that no line can be 
drawn, by any instrument, which has not breadth as well as 
length ; and that the chances are infinitely against the exact 
equality of the parts of the divided line and of the divided angle. 
" The line may seem to you without breadth," he explains, "and 
the line and the angle may seem exactly bisected ; but this is mere 
seeming. If your senses were more discriminating, you would 
discover your mistake." 

This simply means that, in the series of substitutions we have 
been considering, the line will not remain a line, but will turn into 
a surface, and the halves will no longer remain halves, but will be 
seen to be unequal. The geometer gets his first crude notion of a 
line and of bisection in just such intuitive experiences as I have 



The BerJceleian Doctrifie of Sj)ace 191 

mentioned. But he does not rest in the intuition ; he turns it into 
a conception. The geometrical line he conceives as one which, 
under all circumstances, is to remain a line ; the geometrical point 
must not, when narrowly inspected, spread out into a spot; the 
bisected angle must remain bisected. That lines which appear to 
be true lines are seen on closer inspection to be narrow surfaces, 
and that visible points turn into small bits of territory, is matter 
of constant experience. The geometrical line and point must not 
do this under any circumstances whatever. They are abstractions, 
not concrete things. 

7. From the above it seems to be clear that real space is neither 
a hopeless mystery nor the mother of unavoidable self-contradic- 
tions. Real space is the " form " of the real thing, and just as the 
real thing (in any but a relative sense of the word) is not given in 
any intuition, so real space (in any but a relative sense) is not 
given in any intuition. 

When, in any given instance, I pass in thought from appearance 
to reality — for example, when I pass from the visual appearance 
to the tactual thing of which it is the sign — I may regard the 
" form " of the latter as more real than that of the former. It is 
that in which the mind rests for the time being. But, as we have 
seen, any such thing may, in its turn, become appearance in rela- 
tion to a reality more ultimate ; and we recognize that, however 
far we may carry our investigations, there is no reason to believe 
that we shall meet with an absolute limit. Every reality in which 
we may rest at any time is, thus, a relative reality, and its space is 
relatively real. The absolute object and its absolute space are not 
an object (intuitive) and a space (the "form" of an intuition), 
but rather an indefinite series of substitutions gathered up and 
hypostatized into an individual. It is to this absolute object and 
its absolute space that the mathematical conceptions apply in all 
their rigor. They apply to these without self-contradiction, because 
we are here not dealing with an individual experience at all. 

And it should be noted that, just as we do not think of the 
several appearances as so many different objects, but call them 
manifold appearances of the one object; so we do not regard the 
"form" of each appearance, the space it occupies, as a distinct 
and separate space. 

When we walk toward the tree which we see at a distance, we 
recognize that we are conscious of a succession of appearances, and 



192 The External World 

a little attention to them reveals the fact that they differ from each 
other both in '' matter " and in " form " ; in other words, the patch 
of color of which we are conscious undergoes both qualitative and 
quantitative changes. Yet we maintain that we have been look- 
ing all along at the one tree, and we regard that one tree as 
occupying one real space, which does not grow larger, but remains 
always the same. This means that both " matter " and " form " in 
the successive appearances have been reduced to the rank of mere 
signs of a something beyond them. 

So much for the Berkeleian doctrine. As it makes any par- 
ticular finite line in consciousness to consist of a limited number 
of simple parts, it is not open to the objection that it makes motion 
along such a line a wholly inconceivable thing. It does not force 
upon a moving point the absurd task of exhausting an endless 
series. The descending series discussed in the last paper results 
after a limited number of terms in the simple, and there the series 
is broken, for the simple does not consist of parts. In all this there 
is, at least, no contradiction. In an earlier work I have discussed 
the objections commonly brought against it, and at the risk of a 
little repetition I shall quote what I have there said : ^ — 

" It may be argued, first, as it often is argued, that it is impos- 
sible to conceive of any part of a line as not itself extended and 
having parts. It may be admitted that the small parts arrived 
at do not seem to have part out of part, that these sub-parts are 
not observed in them ; but still it is said that one who thinks 
about them cannot but think of them as really having such parts. 
I ask one who puts forward this objection to look into his own 
mind and see whether he does not mean by "thinking about 
them," bringing them in imagination nearer to the eye, or by 
some means substituting for them what can be seen to have part 
out of part. That one can do this no one would think of denying, 
but this does not prove the original parts to be extended. 

" It may be objected, again, that extension can never be built 
up out of the non-extended — that if one element of a given kind 
has, taken alone, no extension at all, two or more such elements 
together cannot have any extension either. I answer that a 
straight line has no angularity at all, and yet two straight lines 
may obviously make an angle ; that one man is not in the least 
a crowd, but that one hundred men may be ; that no single tree 
1 '* On Sameness and Identity," pp. 150-152. 



The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 193 

is a forest, but that many trees together do make a forest ; that 
a uniform expanse of color is in no sense a variegated surface, but 
that several such together do make a variegated surface. It 
may be that extension is simply the name we give to several 
simple sense-elements of a particular kind taken together. One 
cannot say offhand that it is not. 

" Should one object, finally, that, if a given line in conscious- 
ness be composed of a limited number of indivisible elements of 
sensation, consciousness ought to distinguish these single elements 
and testify as to their number ; I answer that what is in conscious- 
ness is not necessarily in a clear analytical consciousness, nor well 
distinguished from other elements. For example, I am at present 
conscious of a stream of sensations which I connect with the hand 
that holds my pen. The single elements in this complex I cannot 
distinguish from each other, nor can I give their number. It does 
not follow that I am to assume the number to be infinite. Much 
less should I be impelled to make this assumption, if it necessitated 
my accepting as true what I see to be flatly self-contradictory, as 
in the case under discussion. It was because of this vagueness 
and lack of discrimination in the testimony of consciousness that I 
said, some distance back, that consciousness seems to testify that 
any finite line in it is composed of simple parts. If the testimony 
were quite clear, the matter would be settled at once. As it is not 
quite clear, the matter has to be settled on a deductive basis. The 
most reasonable solution appears to be the Berkeleian." 

Surely the Berkeleian doctrine is preferable to the Kantian, and 
should replace it. But it is desirable not to overlook the fact that 
the latter doctrine emphasizes a very important truth — it insists 
strenuously upon the validity of the application of mathematical 
reasonings to phenomena. In this it is wholly in the right, for 
here it is recognizing the system of relations which obtains within 
our experience as a whole. Its only error — that is, its only funda- 
mental error — lies in supposing that in dealing with any single 
intuition it is dealing with " real " space and " real " things. If the 
Berkeleian will admit that " real " space is infinitely divisible (as 
it may be), and if the Kantian will admit that " real " space is not 
given in any intuition (as it certainly is not), there need be no 
quarrel between them. 

We shall now turn our attention to the problem of the nature 
of time. 



CHAPTER XIII 
OF TIME 

The seeming self-contradictions which have so often raised their 
menacing heads in the pathway of the philosopher who has had the 
temerity to discuss the nature of space, are reinforced by an ally 
of peculiarly truculent aspect, when it is a question, not of space, 
but of time. When we occupy ourselves with the infinity and 
infinite divisibility of time, we meet the same problems that con- 
front us when we consider the infinity and infinite divisibility of 
space. But when we think of time as consisting of parts which 
are not simultaneous but successive, as made up of past, present, 
and future, the very ground on which we stand seems to sink 
beneath us and to leave us suspended in the void. We are dis- 
cussing time, as though we meant something by the word ; and 
yet, has the word really a meaning ? Can there be such a thing as 
a consciousness of time ? The problem is not a new one. It has 
been stated with such admirable lucidity by Augustine, that I can- 
not do better than to refer to certain passages in the " Confessions " : 

" What, then, is time ? If no one asks me, I know ; if I try to 
explain it to one who asks, I do not know ; yet I say with con- 
fidence that I know. But if nothing passed away, there would 
be no past time ; if nothing were to come, there would be no 
future time ; if nothing were, there would be no present time. 
Yet those two times, past and future, how can they be, when the 
past is not now, and the future is not yet? As for the present, 
if it were always present, and did not pass over into the past, it 
would not be time but eternity." ^ 

Yet, says Augustine, we talk of a long time and a short time, 
though only in dealing with time past or future. But how can 
that which 18 not be long or short? We cannot, then, say of the 
past or the future, is long ; but we must say of the one, was long, 
and of the other will be long. While present, the past had exist- 

1 Book XI, Chapters 14 and 15. 
194 



Of Time 195 

ence, and so might have been long. But no ! the past did not 
then exist ; it was the present alone that existed. The present is 
the only existent, and, hence, if anything can be long, it must be 
the present. 

We are, then, absolutely shut up to present time. Can this 
be long? We speak of the present century, year, month, or 
day, but evidently in a loose sense of the word "present." 

"Even a single hour passes in fleeting moments; as much of 
it as has taken flight is past, what remains is future. If we can 
comprehend any time that is divisible into no parts at all, or per- 
haps into the minutest parts of moments, this alone let us call 
present ; yet this speeds so hurriedly from the future to the past 
that it does not endure even for a little space. If it has duration, 
it is divided into a past and a future; but the present has no 
duration. 

"Where, then, is the time that we may call long? Is it 
future? We do not say of the future: it ^s long; for as yet 
there exists nothing to be long. We say: it will he long. But 
when ? If while yet future, it will not be long, for nothing will 
yet exist to be long. And if it will be long, when, from a future 
as yet non-existent, it has become a present, and has begun to 
be, that it may be something that is long ; then present time cries 
out in the words of the preceding paragraph that it cannot be 
long." 

So much for the unreasonable nature of time as consisting of 
past, present, and future. The pass really seems to be rather a bad 
one. Past time is not now, future time is not yet, and present 
time has no duration. We are reduced to a limiting point be- 
tween two non-existents, and all our apparatus of years, months, 
days, hours — the quart-pots and pint-pots which we have pre- 
pared to measure our commodity — must, it appears, remain empty 
for lack of something to fill them. 

From the persecutions of such metaphj^sical reflections there 
remains, of course, the refuge of common-sense fact : " Yet, 
Lord, we do perceive periods of time, and compare them with 
one another, and call some longer, others shorter." ^ "What 
then, is time ? if no one asks me, I know ; if I try to explain it 
to one who asks, I do not know; yet, I say with confidence that 
I know." The position is well taken, but it is clear that, when 

1 Op. cit, Chapter 16. 



196 The External World 

one rests in this, the flight is from bad metaphysics to no meta- 
physics at all, from an unlucky attempt at analysis to a contented 
acceptance of unanalj-zed experience. It is thus that the plain 
man rejects with disgust attempted proofs of the non-existence 
of an external world, or turns a deaf ear to the plausibilities of 
the solipsist. He does not see what is wrong, but he feels blindly 
that something must be wrong, and he elects to follow his 
instinctive feeling. 

A reflective man cannot, however, contentedly abandon all 
metaphysical analysis. It is not enough to feel sure that we are 
somehow conscious of time as past, present, and future, notwith- 
standing the fact that the past and future are not, and the present 
is the only real existent. The question inevitably arises : What 
does all this mean ? and the question presses insistently for an 
answer. An answer that is either too vague to convey any defi- 
nite meaning, or too inconsistent to command the respect of the 
logician, is no answer at all. It should be rejected in the interests 
of a new investigation, whatever the array of authorities that may 
be drawn up behind it. 

Augustine is too much of a philosopher to be content with a 
mere appeal to common sense. He tries seriously to meet the 
difficulty that stares him in the face. But the solution which he 
offers us consists in simply transferring the problem from the 
field of metaphysics to that of psychology. In the mind we find 
expectation, apprehension of the present, and memory. It is 
memory and expectation that we measure, and not time. Future 
time is not long, for it as yet is not ; but a '' long future " is " a 
long expectation of the future." Nor is past time long, for it is 
not ; but a long past is " a long memory of the past." 

For example, Augustine is about to repeat a Psalm that he 
knows. Before he begins, his expectation extends over the 
Avhole. A little later, a portion of the Psalm is *' extended along " 
his memory. Finally, all the expectation is exhausted, and 
memory covers the complete field. Through the apprehension 
of the present, expectation passes over into memory, and memory 
and expectation can be measured, for they are not non-existent 
as are past and future. Thus we do not, strictly speaking, meas- 
ure time, but we do measure memory and expectation, so that 
what we call measures of time are not without their significance.^ 

1 Op. cit., Chapters 27, 28. 



Of Time 197 

This strikes one as rather ingenious, but it is not difficult to 
see that the problem is made no whit easier of solution by being 
transplanted to a new field. Expectation gives place to memory, 
as the future runs over into the past — the one diminishes, the other 
grows. But can changes take place in an indivisible instant? 
Are not at least two instants essential to change of any sort? 
Can the two instants exist simultaneously? If not, then, while 
the one is, the other is not ; and we can at no time be conscious of 
succession or change, for we can only be conscious of what is exist- 
ent. We may have, then, at a given instant, what I may call a 
" variegated " consciousness, but it can hardly be a consciousness of 
past, present, and future, for past and future do not mean to us 
merely such and such elements in the consciousness of the present 
moment. The past means that which haB been present. But 
when? At the present moment? No, at some past moment. 
But what is a past moment? Can we be conscious of it in the 
present, the only existent? It is clear that Augustine seems to 
himself to have solved his problem merely because he has carried 
it into a somewhat obscure region in which it no longer stands out 
as a problem. He unconsciously gathers up the past into memory, 
and the future into expectation, and makes both in a sense present, 
without letting them lose quite all their significance as past 
and future. Obscurity is a great reconciler of contradictions, and 
Augustine, like many another philosopher, believes that he has 
seen most clearly where the field of vision has been most faintly 
illuminated. 

Thus Augustine has left the problem as he found it. How 
can we be conscious of time as past, present, and future ? Can we 
be conscious of what does not exist? Can the consciousness of a 
punctual present be called a consciousness of time ? Surely the 
problem cries out for an answer. 

That a satisfactory answer can be found, and that we are not 
forced to accept as insoluble any of the antinomies that have been 
supposed to arise out of the nature of time, I think is reasonably 
clear. In treating of time I shall not be forced to enter so fully 
into detail as I should, had I not already discussed the nature of 
space. I shall first briefly criticise the Kantian doctrine ; I shall 
then give in outline the opposing doctrine, which I have called 
the Berkeleian; finally, I shall try to answer the objections 
which may be urged against the latter, discussing, among other 



198 The External World 

things, the problem upon which I have dwelt in the pages pre- 
ceding. 

The Kantian doctrine of time as a "necessary form" of intui- 
tion is open to the same objections as the Kantian doctrine of 
space. 

It is palpably absurd to say that infinite time is given in an 
original intuition,^ and it is only by playing upon the ambiguity 
of that word that the statement can be given the least plausibility. 
We are no more intuitively conscious of infinite time than we are 
of infinite space. The pretended proof that the assumption of the 
infinity of time is a necessity of thought, is the identical quibble 
which is used to prove space necessarily infinite ; we cannot, it is 
said, conceive a time before which there was no time.^ This means, 
of course, that we cannot conceive a time in the time before which 
there ivas no time. Manifestly we cannot, just as we cannot con- 
ceive a number the number before which was not a number; but 
it is foolish to attempt a foolish task, and foolish to find a profound 
significance in the failure to accomplish it. And the argument 
that the world must have existed through infinite past time because 
void time is not enough of a thing to limit the world's existence, 
is the creation of information out of nothing already criticised in 
the case of space. 

When we turn from the consideration of time as infinitel}^ 
extended to that of time as infinitely divisible, we do not find the 
Kantian doctrine more satisfactory. The difficulties met with in 
discussing the doctrine of space, all present themselves once more. 
Are we directly conscious of time as infinitely divisible? Does 
a period of ten seconds seem to us to be composed of an endless 
number of lesser divisions of time ? Do we perceive the succession 
of these constituent parts of the whole? And if not, what does 
it mean to say that the infinite divisibility of time is matter of 
intuition ? Surely the word covers some ambiguity. 

Furthermore, if time is infinitely divisible in such a sense that 
those ten seconds, of which I am conscious as they pass, are 
infinitely divisible into lesser divisions of time, how is it con- 
ceivable that any division of time whatever should come to 
an end? 

1 "Critique of Pure Keason," Transcendental TF^sthetic ; Metaphysical Expo- 
sition of the Conception of Time. 

2 Hamilton, " Metaph.," XXXVIII ; Spencer, "First Principles," Chapter III. 



Of Time 199 

We have seen that Kant passes very lightly over this diffi- 
culty: "I cannot represent to myself any line, however small, 
without drawing it in thought, i.e. from a point generating all its 
parts successively, and thus alone producing the intuition. So it is 
also in the case of every, even the smallest, portion of time. In 
it I represent to myself only the successive progress from moment 
to moment, and this, by the addition of all the bits of time, finally 
begets a determinate quantity of time." That maddening " suc- 
cessive progress from moment to moment " ! How is it accom- 
plished? It seems so easy; and yet, to the Kantian, it is so 
hopelessly impossible. Has a moment parts ? Yes, it is a " bit 
of time " (^Zeittheil)^ and must not only contain parts, but even 
an infinite number of parts — " all phenomena are intuited as 
aggregates, as consisting of a multiplicity of previously given 
parts" — so that we cannot conceive any fraction of a moment 
which is not as much of a problem as the moment itself, or, for 
that matter, as a year or a century. How, then, does time pass ? 
By the successive addition of moments ? As well say, by the suc- 
cessive addition of centuries. In giving such an answer one has 
said nothing at all. No self-respecting Kantian can represent to 
himself "the successive progress from moment to moment," for 
the Kantian moment, which can only be completed by the suc- 
cessive addition of an endless number of parts, will never come to 
an end. " But," says the Kantian, " it does come to an end, and 
there is a successive progress from moment to moment." This 
can only mean that no moment is a Kantian moment. The infer- 
ence is unavoidable. 

I have said that, in writing the above description of our method 
of begetting a determinate quantity of time, Kant evidently for- 
got for the moment that he was a Kantian. ^ That he was capable 
of this lapse is made very clear by another passage in the " Critique." 
He writes: "If we leave out of consideration the succession of 
many sensations, apprehension through mere sensation fills but 
one moment. As something in the phenomenon the apprehension 
of which is not a successive synthesis proceeding from parts to the 
whole presentation, it has, hence, no extensive magnitude ; thus 
the absence of sensation in this moment would present it as empty, 
and, therefore, as = 0." ^ 

1 See the preceding chapter. 

2 " Critique of Pure Keason," Anticipations of Perception. 



200 The External World 

The moment of which Kant is speaking I am tempted to call 
a Berkeleian moment. It has no parts ; it is not extended : yet it 
is not a mere nonentity, notwithstanding the fact that, deprived 
of its " filling," it is equated with zero. It is given in intuition ; 
it is a unit, not an aggregate ; and it may be " filled." This differ- 
entiates it from the mathematical point, which is conceived to be 
the limit of two spaces, and itself incapable of receiving any " fill- 
ing " whatever. A moment filled with sensation is not the theo- 
retical limit of two times — a mere mathematical point in the line 
which represents time. It is an element in our intuitive experi- 
ence of duration ; and is the ultimate element. Given such ele- 
ments in intuition, and the addition of them is not an inconceivable 
thing. But, then, there is no room for such in the Kantian philos- 
ophy. Our philosopher has lapsed into a truth which strict con- 
sistency would have denied him. 

Thus the Kantian doctrine of a time given in intuition as 
infinite in extent and infinitely divisible is plainly untenable. It 
<;annot be set forth in clear and simple language, stripped of verbal 
ambiguities, without revealing this fact. Since the doctrine runs 
out into palpable self-contradictions, we may be sure that no 
opposing doctrine can be more unsatisfactory. Hence, if we are 
wise, we will abandon the Kantian position without reluctance ; 
setting out upon our voyage of discovery, not as unwilling exiles, 
facing the unknown with foreboding, but as cheerful emigrants, 
full of confidence that the extremest rigors of the possible future 
cannot exceed the hardships experienced in the past. For, indeed, 
than the Kantian doctrine, taken as it stands, it is quite evident 
that nothing can be worse. Can anything be more contrary to 
experienced fact than the statement that infinite space and infinite 
time are immediately given in intuition ? Are a round square, a 
triangular parallelogram, dry moisture or wooden iron, more repel- 
lent to the intelligence than an endless series that ends ? than the 
moving point on the Kantian line ? than the flight of Kantian 
moments ? 

But here, as in the case of space, it is well to remember that 
the error in the Kantian doctrine can readily be eliminated by 
emphasizing an obvious distinction — the distinction between the 
crude intuition of duration given in a single experience, and the 
conceptual time which is built up out of such materials. The dis- 
tinction is that between appearance and reality^ and it is quite as 



li 



Of Time 201 

important to lay stress upon it when treating of time, as it is when 
treating of space. If the Kantian will but bear in mind that the 
time which he may consider as infinitely divisible — the time of 
the movement of the mathematical point over the mathematical 
line — is " real " time, and something quite different from the 
duration experienced in any intuition, he may lay the utmost 
emphasis upon the validity of the application of mathematics to 
phenomena, without involving himself in inconsistencies. 

The doctrine which I shall take the liberty of calling the 
Berkeleian does take cognizance of this distinction, and avoids the 
pitfalls into which those who fail to recognize it are precipitated. 
It does not require us to believe any such startling statement as 
that we are immediately conscious of infinite space and infinite 
time, when we know very well that even the distance to the neigh- 
boring town, and the past three years of our lives, can be repre- 
sented in our consciousness only by means of the symbol, a skeleton 
representative never to be confounded with that for which it stands. 
It does not try to persuade us that the ten seconds during which 
we are listening to the tick of the clock are given in intuition as 
composed of an infinite number of lesser bits of time, and that 
these come to an end notwithstanding the fact that they are end- 
less. It recognizes the distinction between appearance and reality ; 
and emphasizes the truth that our experiences fall into a system, 
that any single experience gains its significance from its place in 
that system, and that, when we speak of the " real " in any but a 
relative sense, we are not resting in a single intuition as such, but 
are thinking of something more. The doctrine may be set forth 
as follows : — 

1. As there is a crude experience of extension which is not to 
be confounded with "real" space, but furnishes its "raw mate- 
rial," so there is a crude intuition of duration which is the founda- 
tion of our notion of "real" time. We may, if we please, call 
this a " form " of our intuition ; it is an element in our experience. 

2. We are, thus, intuitively conscious of time past, present, 
and future. 

3. The time of which we are thus intuitively conscious is not 
infinite. We mean something, it is true, when we speak of infi- 
nite time, just as we mean something when we speak of an infinite 
universe; but in neither case are we intuitively conscious of the 
infinity of that whereof we speak. 



202 The External World 

4. Nor is the time given in a single intuition composed of an 
infinite number of bits of time. We are not directly conscious of 
these subdivisions, and it is not reasonable to infer their existence. 
It is as absurd to assume it as it is to assume that a particular 
finite line, given in a single intuitive experience, is composed of 
an endless number of bits of line. 

5. But it is of the utmost importance to remember that no 
such single experience of duration constitutes what we mean by 
" real " time. " Real " time, the time with which science deals, is 
the time occupied by the changes in "real" things, and it is, of 
course, as remote from our immediate intuitive experience as are 
the "real" things themselves. Even in common life, although we 
never think of raising the question of what is contained in pure 
intuition and what is only symbolically known, we distinguish 
between " real " time and apparent ; and we say that half an hour 
spent in listening to a prosy sermon seems long, just as we say that 
the moon seen at the horizon seems large. The " real " size of the 
moon, and the "real" half-hour are standards arrived at only after 
the comparison with each other of a vast number of individual 
experiences, and an observation of the relations to each other into 
which these fall. 

It is this "real" time, the time occupied by the change in 
" real " things, that we may conceive as infinitely divisible. Just 
as the space occupied by an atom is something for science, although 
it lies far beyond the limits of the most discriminating sense-per- 
ception, so the time occupied by the vibration of an atom may be 
something for science, a something to be expressed by figures, a 
duration that may be halved or doubled, that may stand in all 
sorts of exact relations to the durations of which consciousness 
takes cognizance, yet it is not a something of which we may be 
directly conscious as duration. In the complex of experiences 
which is for us the real world, the symbol which stands for such 
periods of time is not without its significance. Indeed, the real 
world in time would be a thing very imperfectly ordered and 
explained, were processes in it not assumed to be divisible after 
this fashion. 

There is a close parallel between our cognition of spaces and 
of times. " Real " space and " real " time are something quite 
distinct from the crude extension and duration given in intuition. 
One may perfectly well hold them to be infinitely divisible, and 



Of Time 203 

yet maintain that the recognition of part out of part in any intui- 
tion can proceed only up to a given point, whether we are 
concerned with spatial or with temporal extension. It is only 
necessary to remember that the particular intuition with which 
one may be dealing is not, in itself, infinitely divisible, but that 
this experience may be made to stand as representative of a multi- 
tude of others. The moment given in intuition, the moment of 
which Kant has spoken as " filled " with sensation, may thus be 
converted into the " real " moment, which must never turn out to 
be a " real " time, however short, but must remain an ideal limit 
between two times. This has its parallel in the mathematical point. 
To the above doctrine touching the nature of " crude " and 
" real " time, there may be raised several objections : — 

1. It may be argued that it is impossible to conceive of a part 
of time that is not itself time, i.e. a something composed of parts. 
It may be admitted that, when we see a flash of lightning, we are 
conscious only of a blinding streak upon a background of leaden 
sky, and we are not conscious of the " generation " of the parts of 
this wonder "from a point." As the direction of the bolt remains 
problematic, and it is impossible to distinguish between beginning 
and end, it is clear that the production of the path cannot be per- 
ceived to occupy time. Still, it may be insisted, whether the phe- 
nomenon 8eem to occupy time or not, one cannot think of it as not 
occupying time. It will be seen that this objection has already 
been answered in discussing space. Thinhing about the experi- 
ence means nothing more nor less than passing from appearance to 
reality, from the intuition to that for which it stands. Of course, 
one must think of the "real" time represented by an intuited 
moment as extended and divisible, but that has nothing to do with 
the point in dispute. 

2. It may be argued, again, that one can never manufacture 
time by simply putting together elements each of which has no 
duration at all — by the addition of the mere moments that Kant 
inconsistently recognized. This objection, too, has virtually been 
answered. I may remark, in passing, that is not an objection over 
which it is prudent for the Kantian to linger. For if a moment 
itself has duration, he cannot compass, as we have seen, his " suc- 
cessive progress from moment to moment " ; and if it has no dura- 
tion, he cannot by such progress hope to "beget " time. In either 
case he is reduced to " marking time " on the same spot. But the 



204 The External World 

fact is, that it is pure dogmatism to assert that moments without 
parts cannot, when added together, constitute time. The impulse 
to this error — a very natural one — lies in confusing moments 
given in intuition with the -'real " moments which we conceive as 
mere limits to periods of time, and which have their parallel, not 
in the minimum sensibile, but in the mathematical point. 

3. In the third place, one may object that, if the duration of 
which we are conscious in a single intuition be not infinitely divis- 
ible, but divisible only into a finite number of ultimate elements, 
consciousness ousrht to be able to distinoruish these elements and 
give some account of their number. This third objection may be 
answered as I have answered the similar objection brought against 
the Berkeleian doctrine of space. What is in consciousness is not 
necessarily in a clear analytical consciousness, nor well distin- 
guished from other mental elements. Were it possible, with the 
aid of direct introspection, to describe offhand all that is to be 
found in consciousness, the psychologist and the epistemologist 
would have an easy task. When we bear in mind, moreover, 
that our crude intuitive experiences of duration hold much the 
same relation to "real" time that our \-isual signs of distance and 
magnitude hold to " real " space, we need not find it surprising 
that our immediate intuition of duration is rather a thing to be 
guessed at than a thing revealed to clear vision. Time intuited is 
a sign of time thought, and the mind does not rest in signs, but 
hurries on to something beyond. 

4. Finally we come to a more serious objection. How can 
time — even *• crude" time — be given in intuition, when time is 
composed of moments no one of which can alone constitute time, 
and no two of which can exist simultaneously ? This is the diffi- 
culty so acutely urged by Augustine. The past is not now; the 
future is not yet ; the present is a mere point, and not enough, 
in itself, to constitute time. How can we, then, be conscious of 
time at all ? Can we be conscious of what is not now, or of what 
is not yet? The single present moment which sums up our actual 
consciousness can give us no inkling of duration. If we admit 
that the past erists. it is not yet past^ and if we maintain that it 
does not exists it surely, as non-existent, is incapahle of being given 
with the present moment in a single intuition. How can there be, 
under the circumstances, even the crudest intuition of duration? 

It is safe to assume that there must be some way of escape 



Of Time 205 

from this difficulty, for we surely mean something by past and 
future. We are conscious of duration in time as certainly as we 
are conscious of extension in space. The question before us is 
only one of analysis, and though our attempts at analysis may 
seem to lead us into strange paths, we need not despair of the 
ultimate solution of the problem. We have seen that other anti- 
nomies have arisen, not out of the very nature of things, but out 
of the infirmities of philosophers, and it is reasonable to believe 
that such must be the case here also. 

Two things appear indubitable : first, that we really mean some- 
thing when we speak of periods of time ; and second, that we could 
not represent these even symbolically, were not something given in 
intuition that could furnish a content for our symbol. Something 
we must have to start with, or the symbol is a word in an 
unknown tongue ; it means nothing. A short line may represent 
a long one, for both have extension ; but a mathematical point can- 
not represent a line as extended. Even so, if no duration is given 
in any intuition, what is in mind when we say a month, a year, a 
century, cannot be duration. It would be quite impossible to 
represent symbolically the changes in a " real " world were there no 
immediate consciousness of change. 

The psychologists have described with some minuteness the 
rise in a consciousness of the notion of time. A sensation is 
present ; it fades gradually into a faint image of itself : an idea is 
present ; it develops the life and vigor of a sensation. In such 
experiences we have the discrimination of memory and expecta- 
tion from actual sensation, and from such beginnings grows the 
consciousness of a world of things in time. With the analysis of 
the psychologists we can have no quarrel ; but it is of much im- 
portance to emphasize the truth pointed out earlier in this paper, 
namely, that no instantaneous photograph of a consciousness, 
whatever the elements it may contain, can yield the intuition of 
duration. This cannot consist in the mere presence in conscious- 
ness at any given instant of sensation and ideas. The past is 
not merely a mass of consciousness-elements fainter than sen- 
sations ; it is what has been sensation. Consciousness of the past 
as past implies consciousness of change, and consciousness of 
change cannot be given in an indivisible instant. The span of 
consciousness, if I may so speak, must include more than an in- 
stant, or there can be no consciousness of time. 



206 The External World 

But how can the span of consciousness be thus extended? Is 
it possible for a past and a future, however brief, which are, 
nevertheless, past and future, and hence do 7iot esnst, to form 
part of one intuition with present sensation ? Can the non- 
existent be given in intuition? 

What seems the most natural answer to this question is the 
ancient one. Past and future do not exist, but they are present 
through their representative — the thought of them is present. It 
is plain from what has been said above, that this answer cannot be 
regarded as satisfactory. Nothing can truly symbolize change but 
change, nothing duration but duration. There can be no thought 
of time to a creature to whom no intuition of time is possible. If 
a consciousness embraces only the present, not the conventional 
present of common discourse — this day, this week, this year — but 
the timeless present of a moment, it can contain no possible com- 
plex of elements that can truly be called the thought of the past or 
the future. A consciousness that is to think time must embrace 
time, must cover more than a single instant. And the question 
thrusts itself upon one : Must not a state of consciousness, in order 
to do this, be an absurd compound of existent and non-existent 
elements? This sounds like nonsense. 

With all due respect to some famous thinkers who have attacked 
the problem before, I venture to maintain that it is not insoluble, 
and at the same time, that its solution does not necessitate a re- 
course to those mystical speculations that solve one problem by 
sinking it in another. The difficulty is, I think, of our own 
making. When we say : How can you be conscious of the past 
and future which do not exist ? Can one be conscious of the non- 
existent? what we really mean is: How can you, at the present 
instant, be conscious of the past and future, which, at this present 
instant, do not exist? Can one, at this moment, be conscious 
of what does not exist at this moment? To the question, as thus 
stated, there can evidently be but one answer. The past can 
certainly not be given in the present moment, or it would not be 
past. The present moment can contain only the present. But 
it should be observed that the question simply assumes that con- 
sciousness is limited to a single instant, and that the present one. 
If this position be denied, its force is quite lost. I can be conscious 
of a past and future, which do not now exist, if the span of my 
consciousness covers more than a "now." The past and the future 



Of Time 207 

are non-existent, /rom the point of view of the present; but then the 
present must be regarded as non-existent from the point of view of 
past or future. To speak of the intuitive consciousness of dura- 
tion as '* a compound of existent and non-existent elements " is 
unreasonable, because the words suggest that the whole conscious- 
ness ought to be now existent — which is impossible, if it is to be 
consciousness of duration — and lead to the conclusion that, 
since it cannot all be now existent, it must be a compound of 
something and nothing, an absurdity over which you may weep or 
make merry according to your humor. 

It will be observed that in the foregoing I have had no recourse 
to the deus ex machina of a timeless self, timelessly present at all 
times, and collecting the fleeting moments upon the impalpable 
thread of its own "immovable activity." How can I, asked 
Augustine, be conscious of a past that does not exist ? Can I be 
conscious of the non-existent? The difficulty that presented itself 
to his mind lay in the fact that the very notion of the conscious- 
ness of duration seemed to be self-contradictory. As we have 
seen, there is a hidden pitfall in his question, and when this is 
discovered, it can be avoided. It is only necessary to take one's 
stand upon the fact that we really are conscious of duration, and 
to keep clearly in view what this implies. When we do this we 
find that there is no absurdity in the notion of a consciousness of 
duration. The apparent contradiction has arisen from the fact 
that such a consciousness has been affirmed and denied in one 
breath. 

It is, thus, a sufficient answer to the Augustinian problem to 
show that there is nothing inconceivable in the fact of a conscious- 
ness of duration. In the foregoing, I have simply accepted the 
fact as a fact, and have made no effort to explain how it is possible 
that there can be such a consciousness. This latter task does not 
appear to me to fall within the legitimate province of explanation. 
We "explain " certain experiences by referring them to others, as 
we determine " where " a thing is by ascertaining its relations to 
other things in space ; but to ask how it happens that there is a 
consciousness at all, or that it is constituted as it is, seems about 
as sensible as to ask : Where is all space ? It is well to recog- 
nize that a " how " and a " where '* may be so used as to lose all 
significance. 

Nevertheless, certain philosophers have thought it necessary, 



208 The External World 

not merely to accept the fact of a consciousness of duration, but 
to go further and to explain how such a consciousness is made 
possible. An incomprehensible something was (can I sayt^^asf) 
timelessly present (siV) with the past, and is (can I say is ?) time- 
lessly present (&•/<?) with the present moment. This holds the 
non-existent past to the existent present, and makes possible a 
consciousness of duration. 

Can any man conscientiously maintain that all this ghostly 
apparatus renders more comprehensible the fact of a consciousness 
of duration ? What is meant by timeless presence at all times ? 
How does an immovable activity manage to hold things together ? 
If we cannot expect clear information, at least we have a right to 
look for a hint. It is no explanation simply to say that an incon- 
ceivable something does something incomprehensible in an inde- 
scribable way. The fact is that this inconceivable something is 
not really any kind of a thing at all. The vague and inconsistent 
phrases in which it is described convey to the mind no definite 
meaning, and, to all appearance, are not intended to do so. I have 
criticised this timeless oddity elsewhere, and have given its pedi- 
gree,^ so I shall not dwell upon it here. It is the shadowy survival 
of an ancient misconception, and its presence in philosophical 
systems can only be explained historically. 

Finally, I feel justified in saying, touching this attempt to 
explain the possibility of a consciousness of duration, that it bor- 
rows what plausibility it may seem to have from the tacit assump- 
tion contained in the Augustinian query, i.e. from the denial of the 
consciousness of duration. How can I be conscious of a past that 
does not exist ? asks Augustine. Can I be conscious of the non- 
existent? We have seen that this assumes it to be self-evident 
that we can be conscious only of the existent — Avhich means the 
at present existent, or, in other words, the present. Even so 
T. H. Green assumes that the consciousness of the present needs 
no explanation, and that the consciousness of the past as such is 
an impossibility. As he must accept the fact that there is some- 
how such a thing as a consciousness of duration, it only remains 
for him to open an unexpected door in the blank wall that con- 
fronts us, by making the past in some sense present — present to a 
something not itself past nor yet present, a something that exists 
simultaneously, so to speak, all along the line.^ Such a thing is 
1 See Chapter V. 2 it Prolegomena to Ethics," Chapter I. 



Of Time 209 

evidently a mere collocation of words, a series of marks on paper, 
not enough of a thing to be brought into court as a witness to the 
respectability of any other thing. But, by taking upon its 
shoulders the task of obliterating in its own person all temporal 
distinctions, it makes the past seem not quite a past and the pres- 
ent not quite a present. 

Thus the past and the present seem in some vague way to run 
together. Time is rendered more incomprehensible than it was 
before ; there may be a " presence " that is not in the present, an 
"always" that does not really mean at all times. Words have 
taken the place of thoughts, and clear vision no longer appears 
to be a desideratum. Surely it is better simply to accept the fact 
of the consciousness of duration, and to exercise such care in 
stating problems as not to create unnecessary pitfalls. Surely 
we are not compelled to assume gratuitously that different 
moments need to be "held together," and then to exercise our 
ingenuity in the invention of inconceivable entities to which we 
may assign this task. 



CHAPTER XIV 
THE REAL WORLD IN SPACE AND TIME 

The preceding chapters have, I hope, made it clear that the 
real world in space and time is not a something given in intuition, 
but is a construct from what is thus given. The real world is, as 
it is sometimes expressed, a conceptual world. It is of no small 
importance to realize just what this statement means, and to avoid 
drawing from it unwarranted conclusions. 

Are we justified in holding that space and time are concep- 
tions ? That depends upon the meaning that we give to the term 
"conception." The statement that they are conceptions may very 
easily be misunderstood. In trying to make clear in what sense 
the statement may be accepted as true, I cannot do better than go 
back for a while to that wonderful little old philosopher of Koe- 
nigsberg, whose sagacity often led him to hit upon truths which 
his followers would see with clearer vision could they overcome 
the amiable weakness of turning him into a fetich, and could they 
consent to criticise him with the same freedom with which they 
criticise living writers who propound epistemological theories. 

Kant strenuously maintains that space and time are not con- 
ceptions, but are intuitions. Now, we have seen that he uses the 
word " intuition " in two senses, one of which is a very dubious sense, 
and the other not applicable to real space and time at all. And those 
who read him with discrimination will see that when he comes in 
certain passages to contrast intuitions and conceptions, he uses 
the word " intuition " in what may with justice be regarded as a 
third sense, and one of such importance that it should be distin- 
guished with accuracy. The passages to which I refer are the 
following : — 

" Space is not a discursive, or, as it is called, a general concep- 
tion of the relations of things, but it is a pure intuition. For, in 
the first place, we can represent to ourselves but one single space, 
and when we talk of many spaces, we only mean by the expression 

210 



The Real World in Space and Time 211 

parts of one and the same space. And these parts cannot antecede 
the one all-embracing space, as constituents out of which it can be 
built up. They can only be conceived as in it. Space is essentially 
one ; the manifold in space, and, hence, too, the general conception 
of spaces, depends wholly upon limitations." ^ 

" Time is not a discursive, or as we say, a general conception, 
but is a pure form of sense-intuition. Different times are but 
parts of one and the same time. But a representation which can 
only be given through a single object is an intuition." ^ 

There is contained in these extracts a truth which nearly every 
one will be heartily inclined to accept. I stand at my study 
window and look out upon the roofs of the city. The world in 
space seems to be spread out before me. My body, my window, 
the nearer roofs, the more remote, the steeples in the distance, the 
faint blue curve of the river, the shadowy woods beyond — all 
these have their places in the same one space. They are neighbors 
who divide the ground between them, and what one gains another 
must lose. To speak of any one of them as in a space of its own 
independent of and unrelated to the space occupied by the others 
is absurd. I am looking at a whole composed of parts, and no 
part is independent of that whole. Each thing has its place ; a 
thing may be conceived as changing its place, but only in the 
sense that it leaves one place and moves into another which is 
there waiting for it. However individual things in this field may 
move about, they must belong to the field. They may change, but 
they cannot lose, their relations to all other things in it. 

Thus this whole expanse seen from my window may be regarded 
as, in a sense, a single thing. It is like the desk which I see when 
I turn my head. I could not see a desk, in any intelligible sense 
of the words, if one part of it were in one space and another in a 
space unrelated to the former. Similarly, I could not enjoy a view, 
if my body, my window, the several roofs, the steeples, the river, 
and the distant wood, really belonged to different spaces which did 
not take their places as parts of a whole. 

Nor do I conceive the space occupied by the things I have 
enumerated to be, even when taken as a whole, an independent 
and unrelated thing. Beyond those woods there must be some- 

1" Critique of Pure Reason," Metaphysical Exposition of the Conception of 
Space. 

^Ibid., Metaphysical Exposition of the Conception of Time. 



212 The External World 

thing. I believe that there are other objects more or less similar 
to those that I see ; and I conceive of them as occupying spaces 
related to the spaces occupied by the things that I see, as the latter 
are related to each other. When my thought sweeps a wider circle, I 
am ready to affirm the same thing of the sun, the moon, and the stai's. 
The things just before me are in the one space-system with the 
remotest of the heavenly bodies, and form a part of a perhaps 
boundless universe of matter, all of which lies in the one space — 
which does not, of course, mean that all material things are in the 
same place, but merely that they are really in places, i.e. are related 
to each other as one part of this desk is related to another. 

It is possible, then, to regard the physical universe as, in a 
sense, a single thing, an individual, of which all that lies before 
me in my present experience is but a very small fragment. The 
distinction between what is individual and what is general, or, to 
use the old terminology, between intuition and conception, is a 
commonplace of the traditional logic. This man walking in the 
street below me is an individual ; he is a thing occupying a definite 
place and time in the material universe, and is thus a constituent 
part of that universe. Man, the abstract rational animal of the 
text-books, is general, not individual ; a something which cannot 
be placed in the street below me, or, indeed, anywhere else ; a 
something without local habitation, which cannot be regarded as 
part of the material universe at all. 

I shall not here enter into the immemorial dispute touching 
the object of the general name. It is enough to point out that we 
do constantly distinguish between man in the abstract and this or 
that particular man. Upon this distinction Kant falls back in the 
extracts above quoted, and he insists that space is an intuition, a 
something given as an individual thing, and not a concept or 
general notion. Space, he insists, is not a mere name for all individ- 
ual spaces, as man is a name for all individual men. It includes 
them, as man does not include men. It is a single object, and 
" a representation which can only be given through a single object 
is an intuition." 

That Kant is quite right in his contention that space is not a 
conception in the sense of the word above indicated, there can 
be no doubt. We do conceive of the whole physical univei*se 
as in one space, and of individual things as occupying portions 
of that space. The learned and the unlearned are agreed upon 



The Real World in Space and Time 213 

this point. It would be mere nonsense to speak of a universe of 
physical things not thus related. But when we call this one 
space an intuition, we should be most careful to make clear to 
ourselves and to others just what one has a right to understand 
by the word. 

It is evident that even what I claim to see when I stand at 
my window is not really given in intuition in the strict sense of 
the word. At a given moment I am intuitively conscious of a 
certain complex of color-sensations. This I interpret in terms of 
tactual and motor sensations, and thus perceive a certain number 
of tactual things. But it must not be overlooked that even the 
visual sensations that represent the things seen from my window 
are not all intuitively present at any one moment with that 
vividness and definiteness that admits of their satisfactory inter- 
pretation. The eyes must move about and gather up the view bit 
by bit, or things remain virtually unseen. And if it is impossible 
for all the visual sensations to be present in usable form at a 
single instant, one is tempted to say that it is doubly impossible 
for the full meaning of these sensations, their interpretation in 
terms of touch and movement, to be intuitively present to con- 
sciousness at any one time. To imagine for a moment that I 
can represent to myself the world of things as seen from my 
window, just as completely as I can a single letter written down 
on this paper before me, seems almost as foolish as it would be to 
suppose that I can really pass in thought over the distance from 
my window to the sun, and hold intuitively before the imagina- 
tion the amount of movement which would be necessary to 
measure it. 

The world as it lies before me is, then, not a thing directly 
given in intuition, even if I stop at the world of common knowl- 
edge, and refuse to follow the scientist into the unseen region in 
which atoms and molecules disport themselves in a space in- 
finitely divisible. What is intuitively present in consciousness is 
not enough to constitute such a world. It can only represent it. 
It is, indeed, the symbol^ and the world is the thing symbolized. 
If there is reason to believe this to be true even of the scrap of a 
world seen from my window, there is the more reason for believing 
it to be true of the great whole of which this is a part. To be- 
lieve that all this is intuitively present in consciousness is simply 
absurd. We think it ; that is to say, there is intuitively present 



214 The External World 

in consciousness that which represents it ; but that is all that we 
can say. 

The same reasoning may be applied to time. It would be 
absurd to maintain that time, the one real time in which we con- 
ceive all the changes in the material universe to take place, is a 
concept or general notion. As space is made up of spaces, so 
time is made up of times. The hour which has just passed is 
distinct from every other hour, and has its definite place in the 
series. The changes which have been taking place during that 
hour are not changes in general, but have their fixed position in 
the whole series of changes which we conceive to make up the 
life-history of the universe. The conception of that life-history 
as a whole is not a general notion applicable indifferently to many 
things ; it is the notion of a single life-history, the one constituted 
by these individual occurrences. 

Now it must be evident to any one who will reflect upon the 
matter for a moment, that it is impossible to be intuitively con- 
scious, in the strict sense of the words, of the whole content of 
any considerable portion of time. I seem to be able to bring 
before my mind with some detail the occurrences of the past 
hour. But it would be absurd to suppose that I can summon 
before me in retrospect every single view in this panorama, and it 
would be preposterous to maintain that I can sum them all up and 
hold them before my mind as though spread on one canvas and 
illuminated by a single flash. I can think of the occurrences of 
the past hour, and, in doing so, I am, of course, intuitively con- 
scious of something ; but that something is a mere symbol, and 
is vastly less rich in content than that which it represents. It 
is the merest skeleton, the barest outline, the blur of blue that 
represents the leafy wood with its numberless effects of light and 
shade. 

And just as real space does not mean to me merely the space 
over which I can sweep my hand, the space which at least seems 
to be intuitively given, but means rather the space of the real 
world, the space regarded by science as infinitely divisible, the 
space of atoms and molecules and their imperceptible motions — 
so real time does not mean merely the duration whicli presents 
itself as such intuitively in consciousness. The passing second 
can be measured in the laboratory in thousandths of a second, 
and occurrences which do not present themselves to any human 



The Real World in Space and Time 215 

consciousness as having successive parts can be proved to have 
such parts. As the vibration of an atom takes place in real space, 
so its frequency can be measured in real time. Neither this space 
nor this time can be given in intuition. They are known only 
symbolically. Thus, in order to prove that the content of a 
given period of time cannot be given in intuition, it is not nec- 
essary to choose so long a period as an hour or a day ; a minute 
or a second will serve the purpose. On the absurdity of maintain- 
ing that all time — all the occurrences in the whole life-history 
of the world — can be given immediately in intuition it is surely 
unnecessary for me to dwell. No one who has not been led into 
error by the ambiguity of the word " intuition " could seriously 
support such a doctrine. 

It is, then, clear that what is given in intuition in the strict 
sense of the word is but a symbol of the real world in space and 
time, and should never be confounded with it. 'We conceive the 
real world in space and time to be infinite and infinitely divisible. 
What is given in intuition is not either. But the world in space 
and time, the object of our symbol, is an individual, not an abstrac- 
tion. That is to say, the expression " the world " does not mean 
to us that which many individuals have in common. When we 
use it we refer to the one great complex made up of all the real 
things we know and many more which we assume to exist. 

Whether one will elect to call this an individual or not, will 
depend upon his taste in the use of terms. Certainly it is not 
marked out from other individuals by constituting, with them, a 
part of a larger whole ; for there is supposed to be no larger 
whole. It is not sensible to ask : Where is all space ? or : When 
did all time begin ? But when we discuss the world, we treat it 
as an individual in that we concern ourselves with the parts which 
constitute it. We act as though we were dealing with a " thing," 
not with a class of things, and, to use the terminology of the 
old logic, our divison is "physical" or "metaphysical," never 
"logical." Since space and time are in this sense individual, 
Kant applied to them the term "intuition." There can be no 
great harm in using the term thus, provided we are careful not 
to be misled by it. Of course there is always a danger in using 
the same word in two or three different senses, for it is so fatally 
easy to slip insensibly from the one to the other. The danger is 
the greater when, as in the present instance, the several senses are 



216 The External World 

rather closely related. That Kant did not keep the different uses 
of the word distinct is sulhciently evident. 

It has probably been noticed that, in the foregoing, I have passed 
from space and time to the things in space and time and vice 
versa^ as though it mattered little of which I was speaking. And 
yet my right to pass in this way from the one to the other would 
be disputed by many. As we have seen, Kant maintains that 
infinite space and time are given in intuition, but finds it neces- 
sary at the same time to offer some sort of proof of the infinity 
of their content. This means that we immediately perceive that 
space and time are infinite, but must discover some evidence that 
the world is infinite, has existed endlessly, and will endlessly 
exist. 

The notion that our knowledge of space and time is thus inde- 
pendent of our knowledge of things is a venerable error, and it 
would be interesting to trace its history. More than two thou- 
sand years ago Melissus of Samos argued that Being must be 
infinite, on the ground that if it be finite, it must be limited by 
the void, which is not an existing thing, and, hence, is incapable 
of limiting anything. In this argument he both denies existence 
to empty space, since he cannot regard it as a thing, and he as- 
sumes that it is infinite, or how could he affirm that limited Being 
must lie in the void? His argument is identical with that of 
Kant, and owes its existence to the same impulse that moved the 
German thinker. 

We can sometimes detect the presence of this impulse even in 
those who make a show of denying the infinity of space or time. 
For example, St. Augustine supposes the question to be raised : 
" What was God doing before he made heaven and earth ? " To 
this question he magnanimously decides not to return the evasive 
answer : " Making hells for those who pry into mj^steries ! " 
He will answer it seriously ; and he does so by taking the posi- 
tion that, before heaven and earth were created, time did not 
exist. It is, hence, foolish to ask what was then taking place, 
for there was no " then." ^ But it is easy for the reader to detect 
that he does really recognize a " then," and pieces out the defi- 
ciencies of time with the aid of "eternity." Like Melissus, like 
Kant, like Hamilton, like Spencer, like a host of others, he as- 
sumes an infinite as self-evident ; and in this he is actuated by 

1 "Confessions," Book XI, Chapters 12 and 13. 



The Real World in Space and Time 217 

the same motive that inclines us all to assent to the statement 
that space and time are infinite, even when we regard it as at 
least uncertain whether the same thing may be said of the world 
that lies in space and time. 

Here it may be objected that in the very use of the contrasted 
expressions '' space and time " and " the world that lies in space 
and time " — expressions in common use and which seem emi- 
nently natural — I am suggesting to the mind that the frame and 
its content are in some sense independent things and may con- 
ceivably be treated independently. If space is one thing, and 
the real world another, why may we not know space to be infinite 
whether we know the real world to be so or not? If time is one 
thing, and the series of real changes which make up the life- 
history of the universe is another, why may we not know that 
time is infinite even when we are ignorant of the extent of the 
life-history which we conceive as lying in it? 

But this view of space and time makes them something very 
like "things," and upon reflection we find that we are not really 
willing to accord to empty space and time the dignity of being 
" things " in any unequivocal sense of that word. Democritus did, 
it is true, wax very bold, and maintain that " thing does not more 
really exist than no-thing," but few have had the courage to 
take this position, with all that it seems to imply. Space and 
time have, as we have seen, inconsistently been treated as things 
and yet not things, shades that must remain inarticulate until 
some reality has been put into them by the draught of blood 
which put new life into the friends of Ulysses. 

We may, then, freely admit that men seem naturally inclined 
to believe that they have a knowledge of space and time inde- 
pendently of their experience of the real world, and we may as 
freely admit that expressions in common use seem to suggest 
that space and time are independent quasi-en titles. But we 
should, at the same time, point to the incoherencies and absurdi- 
ties which arise when one embraces such beliefs or is misled by 
such suggestions. We should point out how such misconcep- 
tions come to exist. We should show why it is that men wel- 
come rather hospitably the statement that we intuitively know 
space and time to be infinite, and shake their heads over the 
corresponding statement that we know the world to be limitless 
and eternal. We can perfectly well explain this tendency with- 



218 The External World 

out having recourse to ambiguous uses of the word " intuition," or 
advancing pretended arguments which shamelessly assume in 
the premise what is to be triumphantly exhibited in the conclusion. 

As I pass my finger across the grille of carved wood that com- 
poses the back of my oaken chair, I have what I recognize as suc- 
cessive experiences of filled space and empty space. The bits of 
wood are " things," and they seem to be separated by empty spaces. 
Reflection reveals that the " things " of which I am thus conscious 
are complexes of tactual sensations combined with, or measured 
in terms of, motor sensations, while the empty spaces are given 
to consciousness as certain quantities of motor sensation taken 
alone. 

This rather primitive experience of things separated by spaces 
lies at the foundation of, and makes possible, the more elaborate 
conception of larger objects separated by larger spaces — of a 
universe consisting of the earth, the planets, the sun, and all the 
rest of the innumerable company of heaven, which we do not con- 
ceive to fill space continuously, but to swim in the void at distances 
from each other which it wearies the imagination to strive to grasp 
even through the symbol. And when we turn our thought from 
the space of common life to the space of science, the fine-spun 
space of atoms and molecules, we carry over to it the same ex- 
perience. We conceive that this seemingly continuous bit of 
paper is not really continuous, but consists of a swarm of atoms 
in rapid motion and separated from one another by distances great 
in proportion to the size of the atoms themselves. Whether we 
speak of worlds or whether we speak of atoms, the distinction 
between filled space and empty space remains to us the same. It 
is the distinction between sensations of movement which measure 
sensations of touch, and sensations of movement which do not 
measure sensations of touch, but serve to measure the relations 
between groups of touch sensations. 

Thus the real world as it seems to present itself to us is a vast 
complex of tactual things standing to each other in relations which 
are measured in terms of sensations of movement. It is, in other 
words, a world of things separated by distances. But it is one 
thing to say that the world seems to us to present this contrast of 
filled and empty spaces, and quite another to say that any given 
spaces are really empty. We have in our everyday experience 
abundant evidence of the fact that spaces which seem empty at 



The Real World in Space and Time 219 

one moment may at the next, as when the sunbeam pierces the 
blind at the window, be observed to be not empty at all. It is 
clearly not for the metaphysician, by juggling with apriorisms, to 
establish the non-existence of a vacuum in nature, but for the 
scientist, by the use of the approved inductive-deductive method, 
to prove or disprove the existence of matter in what seems to 
present itself as void space. Whether there are empty spaces 
between the real things which constitute the world, or whether 
these spaces are to be regarded as filled with something — with 
ether or what not — is something to be proved in somewhat the 
same way as it is sought to prove that there are atoms and 
molecules. 

Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to conceive that between 
the real things which constitute the world there are void spaces, 
and it is also possible to conceive that the universe of matter is 
limited in extent and is surrounded by empty space. It is neces- 
sary, however, to understand clearly what one means by such 
statements, and to avoid giving them an interpretation which is 
plainly erroneous. 

Let us first consider the statement that it is possible to conceive 
of things as separated by void spaces. The question will at once 
be raised : Do not these void spaces really exist ? and must they 
not, then, le something ? This is the old problem that perplexed 
the Eleatics. 

To the question whether the void spaces are real, we may an- 
swer : Yes, if we mean by this only that things really stand to 
each other in such and such relations ; or, in other words, that they 
are at such and such distances from one another. No, if we mean 
that the relation is to be turned into a real thing that is supposed 
to remain when the things between which it obtains are taken 
away. The real world which we build up out of our experiences 
is a world of things of a certain kind ; it is a world of extended 
things separated by distances, and the things influence each other 
in definite ways which cannot be described if the relations of the 
things — their distances and directions — be left out of account. 
It is one thing to recognize the relations between things as real, 
and it is quite another to turn those relations into things of an 
unreal and equivocal sort. It is one thing to recognize that things 
are at a distance from each other, and another to turn the distance 
itself into the ghost of a thing. 



220 Tlie External World 

But, it may be objected, when we speak of space, we mean 
more than the actual system of relations which obtains between 
extended things. I answer, we undoubtedly do ; we mean, not 
merely the actual system of relations, but the system of all theo- 
retically possible relations as well. The actual relations of things 
are constantly changing, and the relations which happen to exist 
at any moment may be regarded as merely representative of an 
indefinite number of other relations which might just as well have 
been actual. We have seen that real things are never given in a 
single intuition, and that what may be thus given can, at best, be 
regarded as merely representative of an indefinite series of possi- 
ble experiences which in their totality express the nature of the 
thing. In the same way we may say that real space, which is 
the whole system of relations of a certain kind between real 
things, cannot be the object of a single intuition. By real space 
we never mean only this particular distance given in this particu- 
lar experience. We mean all the actual and theoretically possible 
space-relations of real things in the real world. 

About time one may reason in precisely the same way. Space 
and time are, thus, abstractions. They are the plan of the real 
world with its actual and possible changes. But this plan is not a 
something of which we have a knowledge independent of our 
knowledge of the world. This ought, I think, to be clear to any 
one who has followed the reasonings of the chapter on the 
Berkeleian Doctrine of Space. We certainly do not perceive 
immediately that space and time are infinitely divisible. Sub- 
division speedily appears to result in the simple in each case. 
Why, then, do we assume that they are thus divisible? No con- 
ceivable reason can be given save that, in our experience of the 
world, such a system of substitutions obtains — a system within 
which the seemingly indivisible intuitive experience takes its place 
as the representative of experiences that are divisible, and, magni- 
fying its function, sinks into individual insignificance. The plan 
stands out ; the particular experience is lost sight of so completely 
that many able writers are capable of wholly misconceiving its 
nature. The plan is, then, abstracted from our experience of the 
world of things ; but when we have the plan we can work more 
or less independently of the experiences from which it has been 
abstracted, and we can satisfy oui-selves, by verifying our results 
from time to time, that we are not wandering in the region of 



The Real World in Space and Time 221 

dreams, but are doing something that has a meaning within the 
realm of nature. But what meaning could a millionth of a milli- 
metre or a thousandth of a second have to one who had never 
had the complex series of experiences which reveals real things 
and real events? They are not given in any experience except 
symbolically, and the only thing that can give significance to 
our symbol is the series of experiences in which a real world is 
revealed. 

Hence, to the question whether a vacuum can be conceived to 
exist within the world, I answer : Undoubtedly it can. But please 
do not substitute for the meaning : "exist as a vacuum," the very 
different meaning: "exist as some kind of a thing." It is easy to 
slip from the one meaning into the other, and philosophers have 
done it again and again. Space and time are the plan of the 
world-system. They really exist in the only sense in which such 
things can exist, i.e. they really are the plan of the system. 
The difficulties which seem to present themselves when men 
inquire whether they have real existence arise out of the fact that 
this truth is not clearly grasped. 

Kant thought it possible to conceive of a vacuum within the 
world, but impossible to conceive of the world as lying in void 
space and time. " Space filled or void," he writes, " may be lim- 
ited by phenomena but phenomena cannot be limited by an 
empty space without them." ^ One may, of course, object to 
this that if void space is enough of a thing to have a real 
existence within the world, it ought to be enough of a thing 
to have a real existence beyond its limits. But we do Kant an 
injustice if we fail to recognize that at least a seemingly plausible 
reason may be given for the invidious distinction which he draws. 

As we have seen, the real world seems to consist of tactual 
things separated by distances. The reality of the distances, their 
existence as actual aspects of being, appears to be guaranteed by 
the fact that they are the actual distances beween real things. 
Now, if the universe be limited, can we say that any distances be- 
yond its limits are in the same sense actual? The earth and the 
sun are, at a given moment, a given distance apart. Whether 
they be separated by filled space or void space, does not affect the 
question of the reality of this relation. But can we say that some 
cosmic body on the confines (if there be such) of the universe of 

1 " Critique of Pure Reason," First Antinomy, Observations on the Antithesis. 



222 The External World 

matter stands in a similar relation to a material thing beyond that 
universe ? Manifestly not. Can, then, anything whatever beyond 
the universe of matter be regarded as really existent ? Can it be 
an " aspect " of that universe ? The distances which we may, then, 
conceive to lie beyond the ramparts of the world are not real dis- 
tances. They are not real relations between real things.^ 

This argument is not, I think, without some plausibility, but 
its weakness is sufficiently evident. I have said that when we 
talk of space we do not mean by it merely the existing relations 
of distance and direction in which things stand to each other at any 
given time. We include all possible relations as well. But it is 
theoretically possible that a real tiling should exist beyond the 
limits of the finite universe that I have assumed, and another be- 
yond that one, etc. Hence, there can be no objection to saying, 
even in the absence of real things, that there is space beyond. 
We have already thought this in thinking a "beyond" at all. 

It is with space-relations as it is with numbers. If only 50 real 
things existed in the universe, we could still say with truth that 
50 + 50 = 100. This does not mean that 100 things exist, nor does 
it mean that numbers are shadowy existences which are indepen- 
dent of things, and can be affirmed to be, before we know anything 
about things. It only means that our number-system admits of 
such and such a legitimate extension, and that, hence, if there are 
50 things and 50 things, there must be 100 things. It does not 
matter one whit to the arithmetician whether there actually exist 
100 things or not. He is, indeed, ultimately concerned with 
things, or his number-system would be a mere play of fancy, and 
would have no bearing upon reality ; but he is only indirectly con- 
cerned with things, and he may in much of his work leave them 
out of account. 

Thus, when men declare space to be infinite, as they are usually 
very ready to do, they are not affirming an existence but are recog- 
nizing a possihility. They are recognizing the fact that there is 
no theoretical limit to their freedom of imacrininor extensions to 
a supposed limited universe. They are extending their space- 
system as his number-system is extended by the arithmetician. 

That this is what they mean when they pronounce space to be 
infinite is sufficiently clear from the repugnance which they exhibit 
at the thought of granting to space such an existence as they grant 
^Cf. op. cit.f First Antinomy, l*roof of the Antitliesis, 



The Real World in Space and Time 223 

to things in space. If they do not realize clearly what they really 
mean by space, they are in danger, as we have seen, of making it a 
quasi-thing, a thing and yet not a thing, a thing too real to be 
banished and yet not real enough to be capable of standing alone, 
an insistent but feeble-kneed spectre. But those who wander 
cheerfully thus far upon the path of error, are unwilling to go a 
little further and make space consistently a thing. Time and 
number, about which one may reason in the same way, are still less 
in danger of being " reified," for they seem to be instinctively felt 
to be less robust and independent.^ It is impossible to doubt the 
fact that men discern dimly, even when they are groping their 
way in rather a heavy fog, that, in dealing with space and time, 
they are not really dealing with things. It is just because they do 
perceive this that they are willing to declare space and time infinite, 
when they know perfectly well that space and time as infinite do 
not fall within their experience at all, that they are not conscious 
of infinite space and time. 

Such being the nature of space and time, and such the signifi- 
cance of the statement that they are infinite, there can be no 
serious objection to making that statement, if it be properly under- 
stood. Indeed, it would seem odd to deny the statement, for it 
would be a virtual denial of an undoubted truth. But there 
must be no misconception. Space, for example, must not be 
turned into a thing or even into half-a-thing. Possible relations 
must not be made actual, and then things arbitrarily assumed to 
exist in order that they may stand in all these possible relations 
and bolster up their dubious being. It is palpably absurd first to 
assume unlimited ivy and then to assume unlimited oak upon which 
to wreathe it. It will not do to extort from a mere misconception 
such significant statements of fact as that there can exist no 
vacuum within the world-system, and no outer limit to the same 
system. These are dreams, not serious arguments, and they tend 
to bring metaphysics into disrepute with men of scientific mind. 

I hope it is clear from the foregoing that the use of the con- 
trasted expressions " space and time " and " the world in space 
and time," does not imply that the world is one thing, and space 

1 It has been my experience that the average undergraduate, in his primitive 
simplicity, is not loth to regard space as something very like a "thing" ; he is 
much slower to admit the same of time, and he is usually ready to deny flatly that 
it can be true of number. I suppose that my classes are not peculiar in this matter. 



224 The External World 

and time independent entities of some sort. The real world in 
space and time is a vast complex of tactual things standing to 
each other in certain relations of distance and direction, and pass- 
ing through a series of changes. The plan or system of its actual 
and theoretically possible relations and changes is what we mean 
by space and time. In this plan we have the " form " of the real 
world. And just as the real world is not given in any single 
intuition, but is a construct of great complexity, and implies 
many intuitive experiences built into a system, so its " form " is 
not the "form" of any single intuition, but the plan of the whole 
system of experiences in which the real world is revealed. Thus 
it is because the real world is what it is that space and time aie 
what they are. They are abstractions from the real world, iso- 
lated aspects of it, and are in no sense known independently. 

It is clear, then, that neither space, time, nor the world of 
real things, can be regarded as given in intuition in the first and 
strict sense of the word ; but all three may be regarded as intui- 
tions in the third sense — intuitions as contrasted with concep- 
tions, the individual as contrasted with the general. But they 
are not independent intuitions, for the first two are abstracted 
from the last ; and the real significance of much that Kant tells 
us touching the nature of space and time becomes apparent only 
when this is clearly apprehended. 

Perhaps I should touch briefly upon one more point before 
closing this discussion. It is possible that the objection may be 
urged that, after all, when we try to conceive empty space, we do 
not really conceive empty space ; that, when we think we are deal- 
ing with the void, we are really dealing with a sensation-content. 
Have we not seen that our initial experience of empty space is an 
experience of sensations of movement uncombined with sensations 
of touch ? Are not these sensations something ? And if so, can 
we say that space, as we conceive it, is not a thing in any sense ? 

Now, those who are inclined to regard the distinction between 
"form" and "matter" as ultimate would probably maintain that, 
although we gain our first experience of empty space in the con- 
sciousness of movement-sensations, and although every attempt 
to bring before the mind any space necessitates the imagining or 
feeling of some quantity of such sensations, yet the consciousness 
of space is not identical with the consciousness of this content 
sim[)ly. In this content they would distinguish between "matter" 



The Real World in Space and Time 225 

and "form," between the sensational elements themselves and 
their arrangement, maintaining that the properly spatial element 
in the experience is the latter, and that it is possible to fix the 
attention upon this to the temporary exclusion or partial suppres- 
sion of the former. This element, they would claim, is not a con- 
tent in the ordinary sense of the word, though it is undoubtedly 
an element in consciousness. Those, on the other hand, who do 
not regard the distinction between "form" and "matter" as ulti- 
mate, would probably admit that empty space presents itself in 
our experience as simply movement-sensations uncombined with 
tactual sensations. 

But whether one embrace the one position or the other, it by 
no means follows that one is forced to admit that we cannot 
conceive empty space. Empty space is not synonymous with 
" nothing at all " ; it is empty space, and is quite distinguishable 
from empty time. The conception "thing" (when the word 
signifies real things in a real world) and the conception "nothing 
at all" do not exhaust all possibilities between them. What is 
meant by real things I have tried to show in the foregoing, and I 
have strenuously insisted that space and time must not be turned 
into such things. But this does not mean that their real exist- 
ence — not as things, but as space and time — must be denied. 
By the distance between two things we do not mean a third thing ; 
but neither do we mean nothing at all. The apparent difficulty 
clearly lies in the ambiguity of the word thing^ and the facility 
with which one may pass from the broader sense in which it is 
used to the narrower. In its narrower sense we contrast things 
and the relations between things; we are concerned with the mate- 
rial world and its aspects. In its broader sense we contrast thing 
with nothing^ and we, of course, see that no element in conscious- 
ness can be regarded as nothing at all. It is manifestly illegiti- 
mate to slip in any discussion from the one meaning of the word 
into the other. It is absurd to argue that, because something is 
in consciousness when we think of empty space, therefore we can- 
not really be thinking of empty space, but must be thinking of a 
thiyig. In the foregoing discussions, when it was denied that 
space and time could be regarded as things in any sense, reference 
was had, of course, only to the narrower meaning of the word. 
This is the only meaning in which it is worth while to raise the 
question. 

Q 



CHAPTER XV 

THE WORLD AS MECHANISM 

The analyses of the psychologist and of the metaphysician 
reveal to us that the real world in space and time is an orderly 
system of things given in terms of touch and movement sensa- 
tions. This is the world of matter in motion which the science of 
mechanics attempts to describe to us. It is quite possible to treat 
of it intelligently without being either psychologist or metaphysi- 
cian, for one may confine oneself to certain aspects of it without 
attempting to discuss certain others. 

When a physicist loosely describes matter as " everything that 
one can touch," and then busies himself with the changes that take 
place in the world of matter, ignoring all epistemological problems, 
he confines himself to a definite field of investigation, and the results 
he obtains within that field need not be at all vitiated by the fact 
that he neither raises nor suggests certain other questions with 
which other men busy themselves. Without leaving the plane of 
the common understanding, he may ask himself whether he is to 
look upon the material world as through and through a mechanism, 
or whether he must abandon this conception as being unsatisfac- 
tory. He has a right to expect that the arguments pro and con 
will be such as to appeal to men of intelligence who are not de- 
voted adherents of this or that metaphysical theory. 

Notwithstanding the fact that a series of eminent names may 
be cited as favoring the opposite doctrine, the statement does not 
appear unwarranted that the man of science, as such, is coming to 
incline more and more to the view that the changes which take 
place in the world of matter form an unbroken series and are all 
explicable according to mechanical laws. 

It ought to be frankly admitted by every one that the material 
world is not known to be such a system. We may, indeed, con- 
ceive it to have swept through an unbroken series of changes, 
from the cosmic mist in which our ignorance looks for its begin- 

226 



The World as Mechanism 227 

nings, to the organized whole in which vegetable and animal 
bodies play their part ; but, even as we call before us the vision, 
we realize that it is revealed only to the eye of faith, and is but 
dimly discerned through the obscurity which enshrouds it. Even 
if we leave out of view the difiQculties connected with the struc- 
ture of the atom and the nature of the ether, we are forced to 
admit that scarce so much as a beginning has been made in the 
direction of a mechanical explanation of the combination of atoms 
into molecules and the origin of the kinds of matter of which, 
as the chemist informs us, our world is made up. Given, too, 
the chemical elements and the laws of their combination as empiri- 
cally known to the chemist, we still search in vain for an explana- 
tion of the phenomena of living organisms, and fail to account for 
their appearance upon this planet. Chemistry, physics, biology — 
these are as yet relatively independent realms, and it remains for 
a perhaps far distant future to give them all a solid basis in 
mechanics and thus to unite our present fragmentary glimpses 
into the nature of things into a reasonable and comprehensive 
whole. We have a collection of sciences whose relations to each 
other are not clearly seen. We have not yet a science which can 
string on a single thread the beads that we have with such labor 
collected together. 

But it is one thing to admit our present ignorance, and it is 
quite another to maintain that it is, in the nature of things, ulti- 
mate and irremovable. The steady growth of science encourages 
those who are imbued with the scientific spirit to hope that, in our 
knowledge of nature, discontinuity will gradually give place to 
continuity, and that there will become more and more clear before 
our eyes an orderly mechanical system, the successive stages in the 
evolution of which will not have to be accepted as inexplicable 
fact, but will be seen to be the appropriate steps in a series of 
changes, the inevitable succession of which we may infer with con- 
fidence, and which we are unable to comprehend only where we are 
still hampered by our ignorance. 

That this faith in the mechanism of nature is justified cannot 
be proved by the philosopher in his closet. It can be proved onl}^ 
by the actual extension of our knowledge of nature, and until this 
has taken place, the doctrine can be no more than a working hy- 
pothesis. It is, however, sometimes urged that it should not be 
held even as a working hypothesis, and various considerations are 



228 The External World 

brought forward to prove that the doctrine is inherently absurd. 
Upon certain of these I shall dwell briefly in what follows. 

1. It has recently been ingeniously argued ^ that the funda- 
mental concepts of the science of mechanics are found, when care- 
fully examined, to be self-contradictory and absurd. The detailed 
discussion of Dr. Ward's strictures may safely be left to the 
student of natural science. But it is not out of place for me to 
point out here that the criticism as a whole appears to arise out of 
a misconception of the foundation upon which the science of me- 
chanics rests. 

It should not be forgotten that the science of mechanics, like 
other sciences, has its foundation in' our common experience ; that 
it is merely the systematization, refinement, and extension of our 
ordinary knowledge of things and their motions. 

The savage, who uses a stick to pry a stone out of its setting, 
the boy who throws a bit of coal at a cat, even these have made a 
beginning in the knowledge of a mechanical system of things. 
That no little advance has been made from such a beginning is 
patent to any one familiar with contemporary science. The notion 
of mechanism is a perfectly familiar one, and to it we constantly 
turn for an explanation of changes which we perceive to be taking 
place in the world about us. Whatever may become of the doc- 
trine of atoms and molecules, it remains true that we can calcu- 
late with some degree of accuracy the position of the moon with 
reference to the earth on a particular day and hour, and we can 
trace with some accuracy the path of a projectile. Whether we 
may not justly expect to find in the notion of mechanism the 
explanation of all the changes that take place in the material 
world, is a question that it is by no means absurd to raise, even 
when one is not at all in a position to prove that all changes in 
matter are mechanical. One may raise the question, and may be 
inclined to give it an affirmative answer, although one be in doubt 
whether any proposed theory of the intimate constitution of matter 
be the correct one. 

Very early in the history of speculative thought it occurred to 
men's minds that those things which, by reason of their minuteness, 
are concealed from our view, might be reasoned about by analogy 
with those things which are more open to inspection. With the 
principle itself we can have no quarrel. We act upon such prin- 
1 Dr. James Ward, "Naturalism and Agnosticism," Part I. 



The World as Mechanism 229 

€iples in every department of human thought. It is, of course, 
important that we should not reason loosely, and should not too 
hastily arrive at conclusions. And if any assumptions which we 
have been impelled to make should turn out upon closer inspection 
to entail consequences which we cannot accept, we should know 
how to repudiate those assumptions without tossing overboard with 
them that whole body of observed facts and well-grounded gener- 
alizations which have established their right to be regarded as a 
science, if only an imperfect one. 

There is such a body of facts and generalizations that con- 
stitutes the science of mechanics. To laugh at this science because 
it has its limitations is unwise, and it is a misconception to suppose 
that a science must be completed before it can have a foundation. 
In the present instance, it is the apex of the pyramid that is hid 
in clouds, not its foundation, for this lies in plain view, and no 
man can afford to despise it. 

What are commonly called the fundamental principles or con- 
cepts of the sciences are not fundamental in the sense that they 
must be definitely established and placed beyond the possibility of 
being called in question, before the science can be built up at all. 
Such principles or concepts are the ideal of a completed science, if 
such a term may be used. They are not to be found in a science 
in the making. Hence one may freely admit that men of science 
are not at one touching the final definition of matter, and are not 
agreed upon the proper formulation of the laws of motion, without 
on that account being compelled to deny that there is such a sci- 
ence as mechanics, and that in it we find a satisfactory explanation 
of a vast number of the changes which we observe to be taking 
place in the world. 

And one may make these admissions without being compelled 
to abandon the hope that, with the extension of human knowledge, 
a vast number of other changes, which cannot now be seen to find 
their explanation as these do, may be found to fall in the same 
general class, and may become luminous with a significance now 
denied to them. It is dogmatism to insist that the material world 
cannot be a perfect mechanism, merely on the ground that, in the 
present state of our knowledge, it cannot be proved to be such. 
What we should ask ourselves is this : What, on the whole, is it 
reasonable for us to believe, and with what degree of assurance 
should we believe it? He who is accustomed to weigh evidence, 



230 The External World 

and who realizes the limitations of our actual knowledge, will take 
his position on such a subject tentatively, and will hold himself 
in readiness to abandon it when good reason is adduced for his 
doing so. 

There is one general consideration, touching the attitude of 
Dr. Ward and of many other persons toward the mechanical view 
of the system of nature, that is of no little significance. It is this : 
The energetic rejection of the doctrine that the material world 
may be regarded as a perfect mechanism appears to arise (if one 
may judge by what is written upon the subject) out of the convic- 
tion that such a view of the world militates against certain beliefs 
to which men cling with a good deal of energy and which they 
relinquish with reluctance. 

We do not find that attacks upon the conception of mechanism 
are wholly destructive in their aim. Those who cannot find in 
mechanics an explanation of the changes which take place in the 
material world, are inclined to find such an explanation in the 
action and interaction of minds. They do not merely abandon a 
proposed view of nature because they find it unsatisfactory, and 
content themselves with holding no view at all. They abandon 
one view to take up with another. It seems just to ask oneself 
whether, if there were the same emotional bias against the second 
view that appears to exist against the first, it would be found so 
satisfactory as many seem to find it? Are there no difficulties 
connected with the second view? Do we there find everything 
clear and comprehensible ? 

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that we discover, 
upon reflection, that the conception of matter remains to us obscure ; 
that we can gain no very clear notion of what is meant b}^ mass ; 
that we are more or less in the dark as to how the idea of cau- 
sality can be connected with the changes in the material world ; 
that the laws of motion, as at present formulated, do not seem 
to us to account satisfactorily for the behavior of all material par- 
ticles in the presence of each other. Shall we on this account 
repudiate the science of mechanics, and give up all attempts at a 
mechanical explanation of the changes which take place in the 
world of matter ? 

If so, what should we do in the case of mind ? Are there no 
disputes as to the ultimate nature of the mind ? Is there a science, 
or even the beginning of a science, that sets forth with any 



I 



The World as Mechanism 231 

approach to clearness the relation of mind to matter, and the 
method by which minds act upon material particles or upon each 
other ? Is it more evident what is meant by causal efficiency when 
one speaks of minds than when one speaks of masses of matter? 
" Intersubjective intercourse " is a sounding phrase that calls our 
attention to the fact, recognized in our common experience, that, 
in some sense^ minds stand in relation to each other. But in what 
sense? How can a mind be related to another? Has the vague 
knowledge of the plain man really been replaced by something 
that has a right to be regarded as science ? Surely the science of 
mechanics, unsatisfactory as it may be, has progressed far beyond 
our knowledge of mind, of its relations to matter, and of its rela- 
tions to other minds. 

Here we see in a glass, darkly ; each man is busied with his 
own speculations, and they are worth all the labor which he 
devotes to them. But a science we have not, unless we extend 
the meaning of the term so as to cover those tentative gropings 
for the truth which precede established knowledge. To find fault 
with the science of mechanics, and to take up with the vague 
notions which men have of minds, the activity of minds, the rela- 
tion of minds to matter, and their relation to each other, is about 
as sensible as it would be to reject the refinements of the developed 
science of mechanics and take up with the crude mechanical 
notions possessed by the uneducated. That material things act upon 
one another, and that minds act and react, the plain man does not 
doubt. He sees nothing incomprehensible in the premises on the 
one side or on the other. It is the philosopher who becomes con- 
scious of the inadequacy of his conceptions, and whose reflections 
sometimes tempt him to reject them altogether. But to treat 
one class of conceptions in the critical spirit of the philosopher, 
and to accept the other with the na'ivet^ of the unreflective, is 
surely inadmissible. 

If, then, it is right to lay great emphasis on the difficulties 
which suggest themselves when one undertakes a critical investi- 
gation of the fundamental concepts of the science of mechanics, 
it must be equally just to emphasize the difficulties which arise 
when one endeavors to make quite clear to oneself what is meant 
by minds, their relation to material things, and their relation to 
each other. If one insists upon clearness and consistency in the 
former field, and is content to get along without it in the latter. 



232 The External World 

it must be either that, in the latter field, the attainment of exact 
knowledge is looked upon as, in the nature of things, hopeless ; or 
that the deficiencies of our knowledge are hidden from us by an 
emotional bias that inclines us strongly to adopt certain doctrinal 
statements whether they are clear to us or not. 

2. Thus we see that one cannot, by merely dwelling upon 
the present limitations of the science of mechanics, prove that 
it is unreasonable to assume, as a working hypothesis at least, 
that the material world is a mechanism all the changes in which 
can be accounted for without passing beyond it to something else. 
Let us make such an assumption. 

In the orderly succession of the states which constitute the 
life-history of this organism we have the physical order of causes 
and their effects. It is, of course, clear that our knowledge of 
physical causes and their effects must be imperfect as our knowl- 
edge of the world-mechanism is imperfect. The boy who strikes 
a dog with a stick recognizes the answering yelp as a consequent, 
to which the movement of the stick is a corresponding antecedent. 
The physiologist interpolates an extremely complicated series 
of occurrences between the two, and regards the blow as by no 
means a proximate cause, while admitting it as a member in the 
causal nexus. Both recognize the relation of cause and effect, 
I)ut to the latter the whole system has become a vastly more 
-complicated thing than it is to the former. And the metaphysi- 
cian, who may come to the conclusion that there is no assignable 
limit to a possible increase in the minuteness of our knowledge 
of the real world and its changes, may not unreasonably deem 
it absurd to use the expression '' proximate cause " in any but a 
relative sense. Still, he has the right to use it to indicate an 
antecedent which, in the actual state of our knowledge, seems 
to be nearest to a given consequent. 

In the relation of cause and effect, when thus conceived, there 
seems to be nothing very occult or mysterious. The conception 
of causality seems, however, to be a stone of stumbling to some, 
and it is worth while to devote some time to its analysis, notwith- 
standing the fact that it has been discussed, and well discussed, 
by various writers. In connection with it there appear to arise 
some very general misconceptions, and misconceptions which 
may materially modify one's view of the mechanism of nature. 

In common life we are in the habit of picking out that element 



The World as Mechanism 233 

in the total antecedent of an occurrence which happens to be for 
some reason of peculiar interest and importance, and of calling 
it the cause. This may easily occasion mistaken notions of cause 
and effect. We point out that Smith was the cause of the 
accident that happened to Jones, in that he handled his gun 
carelessly. Jones himself we do not speak of as contributing 
to the result. Yet it is quite clear that a man cannot be shot in 
absentia^ and the bodily presence of the injured man was an in- 
dispensable part of the antecedent if the occurrence were to take 
place at all. When we leave the interests of common life and 
pass to the scientific contemplation of the order of nature, we 
must view things with an impartial eye, and must not give Smith 
more credit than he deserves. 

In common life we emphasize the distinction between agent and 
sufferer. At times we regard ourselves as actively bringing about 
changes in other things, and at times we deplore the fact that 
external things bring about changes in us. We look upon our- 
selves as active when we move along the street in pursuance of a 
desired end, and as wholly passive with respect to the falling tile 
that unexpectedly interrupts our progress. This distinction we 
carry over to things inanimate, and the notions of activity and pas- 
sivity become more or less confused with those of cause and effect. 

But in the conception of nature as mechanism this distinction 
between active and passive wholly vanishes. The moving 
billiard-ball comes in contact with the ball at rest. The former 
comes to rest and the latter is set in motion. We are at first 
inclined to regard the one as active and the other as the passive 
recipient of its activity. But a little reflection and the most 
elementary knowledge of mechanical laws make clear to us 
that the second ball has affected the first as much as the first 
has affected the second. A series of changes has taken place in 
the spatial relations of certain masses of matter, and it is only 
through misconception that we can regard a single mass of matter 
as responsible for the series of changes as a whole. When we do 
so we are carrying over to a field in which it has lost its signifi- 
cance, a conception which has its legitimate application only in 
another field. 

The same reasoning may be applied to the case of the boy 
striking the dog. If we will regard boy, dog, and stick as 
merely a part of the material system of things, as collocations 



234 TJte External World 

of matter the changes in which take place according to mechan- 
ical laws, it is impossible to look upon the boy as active and the 
dog as the passive recipient of his action. When we do so re- 
gard them we are employing conceptions which have a signifi- 
cance only in the subjective world of desires and volitions, a 
world with which we have nothing to do so long as we confine 
our attention to the material univei-se and its motions. 

To the eye with its field of view thus circumscribed, nothing is 
present save certain groupings of material particles which pass 
through a series of changes in their relative positions. The 
notions of activity and passivity have disappeared, but not so 
the notions of cause and effect. The changes through which the 
whole system passes are explicable according to the laws of me- 
chanics, and each antecedent condition is the cause of the one 
which immediately follows it. The relation of cause and effect is 
a temporal one, and marks the order of the successive states in 
the life-history of the system ; it is not a spatial one, which 
separates off one part of the system from another part. In other 
words, the boy and the stick cannot be made in some sort an 
antecedent, and the dog a consequent; but boy, stick, and dog 
are all antecedent, and are all consequent as well — the former 
at the one instant, and the latter at the next. 

The erroneous popular judgment which would make the boy 
the sole cause of the dog's yelp, seems to arise from a double error: 
the attention is fixed upon a part of the total antecedent to the 
exclusion of the rest; and there is present the mistaken notion 
that only that can be a cause which is "active." The popular 
judgment is not without its justification from a practical point of 
-view. It is not a mere accident that men come to think and 
speak thus. Nevertheless, the popular judgment is shot through 
with misapprehension and confusion, which should, in scientific 
discussions, be eliminated. The notions cause and activity^ effect 
and passiviti/^ should be carefully divorced from one another when 
we concern ourselves with an exact description of the changes 
which take place in the material world. That the notions ac- 
tivity and passivity are of the utmost significance in their proper 
field, one may freely admit. But it is important to bear in mind 
that, when we are studying the successive positions of matter in 
motion, we have nothing to do with them at all. 

It is an imperfect apprehension of the distinction between 



The World as Mechanism 235 

causality and activity that has misled certain writers ^ into think- 
ing that natural science should drop altogether the notion of 
causality, and in place of an explanation by a reference to causes^ 
substitute a description of the orderly series of changes that take 
place in the world of matter. 

Just so long as he confuses causality with activity, will the 
student of mechanics, who sees clearly that the notion of activity 
has no place in his science, be inclined to deny that he has to do 
with causes and their effects. It is because he still thinks of "an 
explanation by a reference to causes " as something occult and 
mysterious — as a procedure akin to the blind gropings behind the 
veil of phenomena popularly attributed to the metaphysician — 
that he repudiates such explanations altogether and confines him- 
self to what he calls "description." 

But it is unwise to discard terms which for centuries have 
served a useful purpose, which are firmly rooted in men's minds 
and are fairly well understood even by those who cannot subject 
them to careful criticism, and which have no satisfactory equiva- 
lents but leave a gap when they are discarded. For such terms 
one cannot substitute terms with other associations without giving 
rise to suspicion and misunderstanding. It is far better to correct 
popular misconceptions of the proper significance of words in com- 
mon use, and point out how such words may find their appropriate 
application. To insist that science has nothing to do with the 
indication of causes and their effects, when for centuries that has 
been supposed by its votaries to be its chief occupation, can only 
occasion bewilderment. To show, on the other hand, that there 
has been some error as well as some truth in the popular appre- 
hension of the natural order of causes and their effects need not 
have this unfortunate result. 

3. Closely akin to the error of denying that, in the succession 
of changes revealed in the material world, we have an order of 
causes and their effects, is the error of denying that the relation 
between an effect and its cause is a necessary one. An effect is 
not contained in its cause as the conclusion of a syllogism is con- 
tained in its premises ; natural necessity is not logical or mathe- 
matical necessity. Seeing this, a man may feel impelled to deny 
that there is such a thing as natural necessity at all. 

'^E.g. Mach, "Popular Science Lectures," English trans., pp. 253-254, and 
Ward, " Naturalism and Agnosticism," Lect. II and XVII. 



236 The External World 

But the word "necessity" has, and has had for centuries past, 
two distinct meanings, and no man has a right to throw awa}' one 
of them merely because it is not the other. To show that a given 
antecedent is a " necessary " antecedent or cause, it is not necessary 
to show that the consequent is logically contained in it and cannot 
be denied without self-contradiction. It is only necessary to turn 
to the inductive logic and see whether there is good i-eason to 
believe that the more or less complete elimination of other ante- 
cedents will leave this relation of antecedent and consequent 
virtually intact. The necessity of nature is but another name for 
the orderliness to be discovered in the system of things, and it is 
a repudiation both of the knowledge of things which obtains in 
common life and of the more exact knowledge characteristic 
of science, to maintain that we cannot attain to a more or less 
detailed acquaintance with this world-order. It is not the duty 
of the metaphysician to show what antecedents are " necessary '* 
or "indispensable." It is the duty of the investigator of nature; 
and he can fulfil this duty perfectly well without paying the least 
attention to those mystical notions of causality which have in the 
past introduced a needless obscurity into human thought. 

The relation between cause and effect is, therefore, a necessary 
one, in an intelligible sense of the word, and the denial of this 
necessity can only result in shaking that wholesome confidence in 
the order of nature possessed in some degree by the unlearned and 
in a higher degree by those whose knowledge of nature is more 
exact and extended. 

Sometimes this denial proceeds from a desire to remove that 
feeling of apprehension which arises in many minds at the thought 
of this gigantic mechanism which seems to sweep through its 
series of successive conditions with the impassivity of fate — a 
world in which even a sparrow cannot fall to the ground except 
according to law; but one in which the dance of an atom, the fall 
of a sparrow, the death-struggle of a man, appear to have one and 
the same significance, and to be summed up in those more or 
less complicated formulae which describe the motions of material 
particles with reference to each other. Even so keen a man as 
Professor Huxley tries this method of soothing the anxieties of 
those who contemplate such a world with discontent, and suggests 
that if we will tiy to eliminate from our thoughts of the order of 
nature the notion of necessity, and will bear in mind that we are 



The World as Mechanism 237 

dealing with the mere relation of antecedence and consequence, 
we shall feel rather better.^ 

It is quite true that to the unreflective there may seem to be 
something less august and inevitable in the succession of changes 
which take place in the material v/orld when one has denied 
necessity to nature and has elected to regard what takes place 
before one's eyes as a mere play of antecedents and consequents. 
The starch appears to be taken out of the fabric ; it hangs more 
limp and diaphanous. And yet, what has one gained? The 
pattern is precisely what it was. If it was ugly then, it is ugly 
now. Figure succeeds figure in the same inevitable order, and 
he who had reason for complaint before, has lost none by the 
change. The word " necessity " he has found unpleasant, and some 
one has obligingly given the thing a new name. Even so may the 
trembling householder decide to call the midnight marauder a 
visitor, and feel reassured and comforted. Meanwhile the man 
has suffered a real loss. He has lost sight of a useful distinction, 
and the order of nature has come to seem to him less stable and 
dependable than it was before. 

It is, then, through an incomplete apprehension of what is 
properly meant by natural necessity that one is led to deny 
necessit}'- to the relation of cause and effect. And it is through a 
misapprehension of what is meant by explanation^ that one is 
led to maintain that it is impossible to explain why certain 
causes should be followed by certain effects.^ 

1 " Methods and Results," N.Y., 1893 : " On the Physical Basis of Life." 
2 I know no better illustration of this exenteration of the notion of causality 
than that presented in the fourth chapter of Professor Pearson's "Grammar of 
Science." He discards the idea that a cause is the occult and mysterious thing that 
has sometimes passed by that name. He agrees with Mill in thinking that causa- 
tion is " uniform antecedence." But he finds it necessary to insist that the relation 
of cause and effect is not a necessary one (2d. ed., pp. 113, 116, 118, 119), and he 
reiterates the statement that science, in discovering causes and effects, does not 
explain things : " Mechanical science no more explains or accounts for the motions 
of a molecule or of a planet than biological science accounts for the growth of a 
cell " (p. 115) ; " in no single case have we discovered why it is that these motions 
are taking place ; science describes how thej'' take place, but the why remains a 
mystery" (p. 120) ; " when we say that we have reached a 'mechanical explana- 
tion ' of any group of phenomena, we only mean that we have described in the con- 
cise language of mechanics a certain routine of perceptions. We are neither able 
to explain why sense-impressions have a definite sequence, nor to assert that there 
is really an element of necessity in the phenomena" (p. 116). It seems odd that 
Professor Pearson did not see that, if science (in the broad sense of the word) had 



238 The External World 

It was remarked by Immanuel Kant that it requires some 
sagacity for a man to know what questions he may safely ask. 
The remark was a wise one. There is a sense in which it is proper 
to ask for the expLanation of this or that occurrence, and there is 
a sense in which it is not. Both in common life and in science we 
are constantly seeking an explanation of what comes to pass, and 
are constantly finding certain explanations satisfactory. The fall 
of the apple to the earth, the motion of the moon in its orbit, the 
ebb and flow of the tides, all these we regard as explained when 
the}^ are seen to be illustrations of the laws of mechanics. The 
particular occurrence in question is found to have its appropriate 
place in the mechanical world-order, and we should rest content 
with this, for this is explanation. 

But if we will go on to insist that the whole mechanical sys- 
tem is a something to be accepted as inexplicable fact, we deserve 
any unhappiness that such reflections may occasion us. We extend 
the meaning of the word " explanation " quite beyond what is legiti- 
mate either in common thought or in science, and then complain 
that we lack an explanation of something, sadly electing to regard 
this something as " brute fact." This is not a recognition of the 
truth that no explanation can sensibly be asked for; it is an 
unwise insistence upon the fact that none is forthcoming, and, 
of course, carries with it the suggestion that it would be highly 
desirable if one were forthcoming. " Brute fact " means fact 
that stands in need of explanation and appears to lack it. 
To call the system of things as a whole " brute fact " is simply 
misleading. 

4. Such reflections as the above should, I think, serve to set 
aside certain of the objections which some may be inclined to urge 
against the world as mechanism. If the conception of mechanism 
seems to us absurd, it is because we imperfectly comprehend what 
that conception is, as it is gradually growing clearer to science. 
If we deny the existence of material causes, it is because we con- 
found the notions of causality and activity, or erroneously assume 
that a cause can only be something occult and mysterious, which 
must be eschewed by science. If we repudiate natural necessity, 
it is because we fail to perceive that the word " necessity " is an 
ambiguous one. If we insist that science cannot offer an explana- 

really succeeded in finishing her task, there ought to be no why and no mystery. They 
disappear by absorption into the how. 



The World as Mechanism 239 

tion of the occurrences in the material world, it is because we give 
the word " explanation " an unjustifiable meaning. 

It is, however, quite possible for one to avoid these errors and 
yet to feel dubious about yielding assent to the doctrine that the 
world of matter is a perfect and independent mechanism, every 
change in every part of which must find its whole explanation in 
the system itself. 

We are all impressed by the striking contrast between the 
living and what is recognized as mechanical. The word " machine '* 
calls before our mind a steam-engine, a spinning-jenny, or a print- 
ing press ; a gross clattering mass of metal, between which and a 
rose or a violet the difference seems to be world-wide. The 
machine obeys laws clearly seen to be mechanical, it is compara- 
tively simple, it appears adapted to the attainment of a particular 
end, but is incapable of attaining it by any but the one direct path 
along which we have set it moving. The plant presents the phe- 
nomena of life ; which means the direct opposite of all this. Into 
the indefinite complexity of its structure we have no means of 
seeing clearly ; its growth and development cannot be shown to be 
the result of mechanical causes exclusively; it appears to move 
toward an end of its own, and to have a capacity for attaining this 
end by certain by-paths when for some reason the direct road is 
obstructed. The plant develops according to a certain plan, and 
after this plan reproduces its kind. When the end of a branch is 
pruned away, buds form and new sprouts make their appearance 
to carry out the idea with which the mutilation interfered. If we 
have here a machine, it is at least a machine which must not be 
brought down to the level of the mechanisms constructed by man 
to carry out his purposes. 

And if we pass from plant to animal the contrast is, if possible, 
more striking. I have said above that, in the mechanical view of 
the material world, the boy who strikes a dog with a stick, and the 
dog that receives the blow, are simply masses of matter under- 
going certain changes in their space-relations to one another, all 
of which changes are explicable by the laws of mechanics, and 
form an inevitable succession of states related to each other as 
cause and effect. Yet the fact remains that a boy whom we 
recognize to be of a certain stamp will, as we know before the act, 
hit the dog under the most varying circumstances — whether the 
animal be on this side of him or on that, within easy reach of him 



2-40 The External World 

or further away, standing still or moving. He will even chase 
him around the house again and again ; in which case the descrip- 
tion of the successive positions of the material particles which 
make up bo}-, stick, and dog, in their relations to each other and to 
other things, must attain to enormous complexity. The one 
certain thing, in the present incomplete state of our knowledge, 
seems to be that the boy will hit the dog — i.e. that, to speak 
mechanically, a certain final collocation of material particles will 
be attained. The path by which it is to be attained seems highly 
uncertain. 

If, then, this boy and this dog are machines, they certainly 
differ widely from the machines which are commonly recognized 
as such, and it is manifestly an error to overlook the difference. 
It is possible to be so impressed by it as to maintain that the 
notion of mechanism must be abandoned altogether when one is 
considering such things, and with it abandoned the explanation by 
a reference to efficient causes which is the very sheet-anchor of 
science. On the other hand, one may estimate this difference at 
its full value, and nevertheless believe that the phenomena pre- 
sented by living beings, growth, development, reproduction, activ- 
ities of the most varied description, dissolution, — all would be 
capable of description in mechanical terms, were our knowledge 
and our intellectual powers sufficiently advanced. One may point 
out that the possibility of a detailed description of the processes 
by means of which things come about is not in the least incompat- 
ible with the recognition of the fact that such and such things do 
come about. In other words, one may point out that the existence 
of efficient causes — the " necessary antecedents " of which I have 
spoken above — is not incompatible with that of final causes, for 
these latter are only the ends which are attained through the 
instrumentality of the former. 

It is a matter of common experience that it is quite possible 
to have a knowledge that such and such an occurrence will take 
place, and yet to be in the dark as to the series of causes which 
will bring it about. One may know that it is likely to rain, and 
yet have the vaguest possible notion of those atmospheric changes 
which give birth to the falling drops. Similarly, the simulta- 
neous appearance of boy and dog within one's horizon may give 
rise to the conviction that sooner or later these two masses of 
matter will stand in the definite mutual relation referred to above; 



The World as Mechanism 241 

and yet one may have no clear idea of the particular series of 
changes which will precede this particular result. 

Thus one may know empirically that with one's gun at a cer- 
tain elevation, with a given charge of powder, and with a given 
projectile, one may hit a target at a fixed distance. At the same 
time one may be quite unable to calculate the path of the projectile 
from the gun to the target. When one knows something of the 
science of mechanics, one no longer thinks of the beginning and 
end of this series of changes as constituting all that is worthy of 
attention in the occurrence as a whole. There are no longer one 
cause and one effect ; there is an indefinite series of causes each 
followed by its effect, and the initial antecedent is no more impor- 
tant to the final result than are any of the others. 

Those who incline to view the universe of matter as a perfect 
mechanism must look upon the series of changes which take place 
in the relative positions of the boy and the dog as constituting 
such a chain of causes and effects. They cannot admit for a mo- 
ment that the end is fixed independently of the means. To them 
the end is simply one term in a complicated series, and its coming 
into existence is conditioned upon the links in the chain preceding 
it. But they may freely admit that they are sometimes pretty 
sure of the end when they are by no means clear as to the exact 
path by which it will be attained, as has been said above. They 
may point out that we can be very sure when we drop a ball inside 
of the rim of the bowl on the table before us that the ball will 
ultimately come to rest at the very bottom of the bowl, and yet we 
may find it difficult or even impossible to describe in detail all the 
motions of the ball before it comes to rest. Which means that in 
a causal series admittedly mechanical it may be possible to predict 
the appearance of a given term, even when we have no definite 
knowledge of those that precede it. 

To all this it may be objected that it is easy to suggest that all 
the changes which take place in those masses of matter that we 
call living beings may find their explanation within the realm of 
mechanics, but it is another thing to prove that they actually do 
this. When the boy's gaze has once rested upon the dog, the end 
seems to be fixed, as in the ancient conceptions of fate, and the 
means appear to be conditioned by the end, not the end by the 
means. Can a mechanism select this and reject that, taking what 
serves a given end and refusing what does not ? Has any one the 



242 The External World 

least conception of a mechanism that can pick and choose in this 
way ? If not, why insist that living beings must be brought under 
the conception of mechanism? 

To this one may answer that, even in the gross mechanisms 
constructed by man, we are not without some suggestion of selec- 
tion. To get the bit of chocolate out of the metal case that stands 
against the wall in the railway station, one must drop the appro- 
priate coin into the slot, just as one must deposit the appropriate 
coin in order to obtain a sandwich from the woman at the lunch- 
counter. And one wholly ignorant of the extent to which the 
construction of mechanisms has been carried, might easily be 
tempted to think that the motions of the machine that tests the 
weight of the coins committed to it, sorting out into different 
heaps the perfect and the imperfect, are determined by the end to 
be attained and not by a chain of mechanical causes. To one who 
understands the construction of such mechanisms there is nothing 
marvellous in the thought that a definite end will be attained as 
the result of a strictly mechanical series of processes, and that the 
attainment of other results will be provided against just because 
of this series of causes. 

Between the most ingenious of such machines and the boy of 
whom I have been speaking, there is doubtless an enormous differ- 
ence, and one which it would be foolish to overlook. Bdt it should 
not be forgotten that between the human body and organic struc- 
tures which are less highly developed there are also differences 
which are sufficiently striking. We are not compelled to pass at 
a jump from a weighing-machine to a man. There are forms of 
life that exhibit phenomena which, if they do not serve to bridge 
the gulf between the organic and the inorganic, at least bring us 
to the brink with a strong disposition to launch away. The evi- 
dences of what we are inclined to recognize as choice, in an un- 
equivocal sense of that word, grow less and less as one descends in 
the scale, and the approach to mechanism, as we commonly think 
of it, seems a sufficiently close one. 

If we elect to believe that all motions in matter cannot be 
accounted for by a reference to mechanical causes, where shall we 
make the break ? Shall it be between the organic and the inor- 
ganic, or shall it be placed somewhere above this point? The 
question is not an absurd one, for, as the student of the history of 
philosophy well knows, thoughtful men have not boon at one 



The World as Mechanism 243 

touching the answer that should be given to it. The disciples of 
Descartes drew the line between man and all that lay below him. 
This would make the boy of our illustration something more than 
a mechanism, but the dog, who appears equally active, and almost 
equally ingenious, would be a mechanism and nothing more. 
Modern science, imbued as it is with a strong desire to remove 
what seem to be breaks in the orderly development of nature, 
would find it difficult, having gone as far as this, not to go farther. 

The adherent of the view that the material world is through and 
through a mechanism may argue that the objection which has been 
urged to his view is, in so far as it really is an objection, nothing 
more than an argumentum ad ignorantiam. 

If it be merely intended to point out that, on the slender basis 
of actual knowledge which we at present possess, modesty is an 
appropriate virtue, and dogmatism a thing to be deplored, even the 
most enthusiastic student of science should welcome the admo- 
nition. It is foolish to maintain that we know, where we only have 
hints and guesses. It is, of course, also foolish to reject those 
hints and guesses, if they are the best that we have at the present 
moment. One should take them at what they are worth, holding 
one's opinion tentatively, and striving neither to be blinded to 
new light by ancient prejudices, nor carried off of one's feet by the 
currents of contemporary thought, which may or may not happen 
to be setting in the direction of true progress. 

If, again, the objector merely wishes to emphasize the fact that 
boys are not such machines as we place in position against the 
wall of a railway station, and to insist upon the truth that there is 
in our experience such a thing as the choice of ends and the ad- 
justment of means to their attainment, no sensible man can have 
any quarrel with him for this. There can be no more serious 
error than to suppose that because all the changes which take 
place in a boy's body, and in its relations to other things, can 
be brought under the conception of mechanism, therefore, the 
boy must no longer be regarded as a boy, but rather as a bit of 
furniture. As well argue that because a boy is an animal we 
must look upon him as a flea. When things widely diverse are 
brought under the same general concept, it does not mean that 
the differences that distinguish them are obliterated. It is, there- 
fore, of the utmost importance to remember that an extension of 
the concept of mechanism does not in the least wipe out the dis- 



244 The External World 

tinction between what are commonly recognized as machines, and 
living organisms. That distinction is a marked one, and one must 
be a slave to one's idea when one is misled into overlooking it. To 
call attention to the distinction, where there is danger that it may 
be forgotten, is a public service. 

But if the objector does not intend to do either of the things 
mentioned just above, and does intend dogmatically to maintain 
that no extension of our knowledge of boy, dog, stick, and their 
material environment — not even the knowledge of which at present 
science dreams and which it recognizes as quite beyond its grasp 
— would reveal that the series of changes which have taken place 
are part of a mechanical order of things, he seems to arrogate to 
himself an authority to which he can lay no just claim. Were he 
in a position to show that the attainment of such and such ends 
could not be effected by a series of mechanical causes, his position 
would be a reasonable one. As he is only in a position to show 
that no one knows just how it can be, it does not appear very 
reasonable. 

It does not seem, then, that we need be deterred from assum- 
ing, as a working hypothesis at least, that the universe of matter 
is a perfect mechanism, either by supposed difficulties connected 
with the concept of mechanism itself, or by the fact that science is 
not now in a position to prove the justice of all its guesses at the 
truth. But there is one objection which appears to have more 
weight. In our common experience of the world, it is an undeni- 
able fact that there are such things as minds. It is as fair to ask 
what these are, and what is their true place in a reasonable scheme 
of the system of things, as it is to ask any of the questions touch- 
ing the nature of matter with which the student of physical science 
occupies himself. For an answer to such questions one can no 
more turn directly to the crude and undigested experience of the 
plain man, than one can for an answer to questions concerning 
the nature of matter. Still, there is a way of approaching such 
questions. And if it be discovered that a given view of the physi- 
cal universe is really incompatible with what seems, after critical 
examination, to be known about minds, it is an argument against 
that view not to be despised. 



PART III 
MIND AND MATTEE 

CHAPTER XVI 
THE INSUFFICIENCY OF MATERIALISM 

It must ever remain a matter of regret to those who are imbued 
with the scientific spirit, and who love clear thinking, that the 
works of Democritus were allowed to perish. When one has 
wearied one's wings by soaring in the empyrean with Plato ; when 
one aches in every joint after an agonizing struggle with the Aristo- 
telian conceptions of matter, form, moving cause, and final cause ; 
one turns with a sigh of relief to the simpler and clearer teachings 
of the ancient materialism. 

The system is easy to understand ; its outlines are distinct and 
may readily be followed by the eye. It reveals itself to one frankly 
and openly, standing naked in the light of day, stripped of that 
veil of ambiguous words and unintelligible expressions with which 
philosophic systems are wont to drape themselves. It informs us 
that nothing exists save atoms and void space. These atoms differ 
from one another only in size, shape, and position. They have 
always been in motion. Their mutual collisions result in mechan- 
ical combinations from which are born world-systems, with their 
varied phenomena. Nothing comes from nothing; nothing becomes 
non-existent. The cosmic changes are but translocations of mate- 
rial particles, and this truth may be grasped by the reason, though 
the senses are too dull to furnish direct verification of it. The 
universe is a universe of matter in motion, a gigantic mechanism, 
the successive steps in whose development form a limitless chain 
of causes and effects in no ambiguous sense of those words. The 
whole of science is summed up in the comprehension of this order 
of causes. 

245 



246 Mind and Matter 

That Democritus was an unblushing dogmatist, and cheerfully 
described in detail all sorts of things of which he could have no 
possible knowledge, seems sufficiently evident. There is a strik- 
ing difference between the easy birth of the atomistic doctrine in 
ancient times, and the protracted labor which resulted in the 
atomic tlieory as we have it now. The old world was uncritical, 
and cheerfully optimistic as to what could be accomplished by 
speculative thought. The modern world is more cautious, and 
has a somewhat better realization of the magnitude of its task. 
Hence the ancient atomism can easily be criticised in detail ; and 
yet its bitterest assailant cannot fail to see that it has grasped 
with marvellous clearness an idea in which men of science are 
more and more coming to rest, the idea of the world as a mechan- 
ism, the life-history of which is summed up in an unbroken chain 
of mechanical causes and effects. The teachings of Democritus, 
modernized in form and rendered a trifle less dogmatic, would not 
be found to be much out of harmony with what has been said in 
the preceding chapter touching the occurrences which take place 
in the material world. 

I say expressly, touching the occurrences which take place in 
the material world, for that chapter has concerned itself only with 
matter and the motions of matter, ignoring the existence of any- 
thing beyond. The ancient materialism lays down for itself, it 
is true, the same limitations ; but it undertakes, nevertheless, to 
say something about minds and their knowledge of things, a field 
of investigation which it can call its own, as we shall see, only as 
the result of an act of violence which rebaptizes the minds and 
i^rnores the existence of their knowledgre altocrether. ^lind is 
composed of fine, round atoms, and is disseminated through the 
body. Atoms are discharged from external objects, pass through 
space to the organs of sense, and mechanically affect the mind ; 
thus arises the knowledge of external things. 

This doctrine, as it was later developed in detail by the Epicu- 
reans,^ is highly ingenious and, to men at a certain stage of their 
reflective development, can scarcely fail to be attractive. It differs 
only in unessentials from the type of doctrine with which we fre- 
quently meet to-day, in men of science who have paid little atten- 
tion to philosophical disciplines and are unacquainted with the 
history of speculative thonglit. They do not speak of mind-atoms, 
iSee Lucretius, " De Rcruni Natura," III. 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 247 

but there is mucli talk of the external stimulus, of the organ of 
sense, of the sensory tracts, of the central nervous system, of the 
motor reaction. There is also a tacit assumption that with an 
exhaustive investigation of all these, the whole field is covered. 

Yet it is clear that both the ancient and the modern materialism 
simplify their task by dropping out of sight what is most obscure 
and elusive, and fixing their attention exclusively upon what is 
comparatively easy to grasp. If mind-atoms differ only in size or 
shape or mobility from other atoms, if they have their location in 
space, it is easy to conceive how they may be jarred into new 
motions by the impact of atoms cast off by surrounding objects. 
There is nothing hopelessly mysterious in the clash of material 
particles ; we see something of the kind going on about us on a 
larger scale all the time. But if we are to be content with this 
view of the process of knowing, we must pass lightly over the very 
significant statement that " thus arises the knowledge of external 
things." Nothing exists save atoms and void space; under which 
of these heads shall we subsume this " knowledge " ? or shall we, 
perhaps, make it identical with the motions of the atoms through 
the space ? And if we drop the notion of mind-atoms, and con- 
fine ourselves to the study of nervous processes and those physical 
events in which they have their inception and in which they ter- 
minate, the case is the same. What becomes of those phenomena 
with which the psychologist supposes himself to be dealing ? What 
becomes of sensations, memories, thought-processes? A whole world 
of things seems to be left wholly out of account, ignored as though 
it were non-existent. Shall we outrage common sense by insist- 
ing that these are but another name for the nervous processes them- 
selves, and hence do not require independent investigation ? 

The absurdity of such a position can best be made clear by the 
use of an illustration. Let us suppose the boy, whose motions 
have been discussed in the preceding chapter, to be about to begin 
his attack upon the dog. As we have seen, boy and dog are cer- 
tain collocations of material particles in certain space-relations to 
each other and to the rest of the material world. They are part 
of the mechanical system of things. Every motion of every particle 
is foreordained by the law of the whole, and could be foretold by 
one sufficiently well informed and sufficiently wise. To us, the 
spectators of the drama, the actors do not seem to be such swarms 
of minute elements, but Democritus could inform us that this is 



248 Mind and Matter 

because our senses are too weak to see them as they are. Suppose 
that by some miracle this hindrance were removed, and that boy 
and dog stood revealed to us in their atomistic nudity — infinitely 
complex, discontinuous, each a universe in which system could 
be traced within system, all developing their countless series of 
changes in harmony with mechanical laws. Could we see all this 
as it would be open to the eye of omniscience, the task of science, 
in so far as it is merely physical science, would be satisfactorily 
completed. Every change in every particle of matter and, hence, in 
every collocation of particles, would be accounted for. We should 
know perfectly why the boy hits the dog, and why the dog runs 
through his series of twistings and turnings. Puffed up with such 
knowledge we might feel inclined to despise the blind antipathy 
to Dr. Fell that remains incapable of justifying its existence by a 
reference to mechanical causes. 

But while we are thus gazing upon the intimate structure of 
the boy and the dog, we become conscious of the fact that the 
closest acquaintance with the machine does not bring within our 
view certain things that we might have expected to find there. 
The boy sees the dog, and sees him to be yellow. He hears him 
bark. What are these sensations of color and sound? What 
have they to do with the mechanism ? They are certainly not a 
part of it in any intelligible sense of the word. The machine and 
all its workings can be perfectly well understood without referring 
to them at all. 

To our discriminating eye the vibrations in the luminiferous 
ether and the vibrations in that grosser medium, the air, lie open 
and are numbered. The mechanical changes, the translocations of 
atoms, which take place in the organ of sense — changes which an 
observer endowed with a vision less acute could only subsume 
under such concepts as chemical or " vital " — stand forth stripped 
of their mystery. The subsequent changes in the sensory nerves, 
the rearrangement of atoms and molecules in the central nervous 
system, the changes in the motor nerves and in the muscles, all 
these we follow step by step. The chain of mechanical causation 
is unbroken, and it is nowhere necessary to turn aside from the 
straight path upon which we are journeying. Nowhere do we find 
color or sound, or anything resembling color or sound. The more 
clearly one realizes just what is meant by the world as mechanism, 
the more clearly does one see that it is a world which has in it no 



I 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 249 

room for a vast number of things which are plainly to be found in 
our experience, and the existence of which can only be overlooked 
by one blinded by prepossession in favor of some philosophical 
theory. 

Upon the crudely unreflective materialism which rather startled 
the world with the emphasis of its unmeaning utterances half a 
century ago it is scarcely necessary to comment to-day. The much- 
discussed statement that the brain secretes thought as the liver 
secretes bile needs no labored refutation. To such vision as we 
are supposing ourselves to possess, the mechanical structure and 
functioning of each organ would be plainly evident. The secret- 
ing organ and the secretion would in each case be perceived to 
be such and such collocations of matter, having an unequivocal 
existence in the material world of things, and no single atom or 
molecule in either would lack its definite place in the mechanism 
of the universe. 

The globule of saliva is as much a part of the material w^orld 
as is the salivary gland. The atoms which compose it have an 
existence as independent as the atoms which compose any other 
group, and they are equally indestructible. Their relations to the 
atoms in every other group are spatial, and all changes in these 
relations may be described as motions in space. The gland and 
the secretion may be separated and set at a distance from each 
other; this does not affect the existence of the secretion. The 
gland may be destroyed, that is, the collocation of material particles 
which passes by that name may be made to undergo great change ; 
nevertheless the secretion may remain unaffected. The relative 
independence of gland and secretion, and the unmistakable material 
nature of the latter are thrust unpleasantly upon our attention by 
the numberless threats and admonitions which the constituted 
authorities in civilized countries have found it necessary to affix to 
the walls of waiting rooms in railway stations, to hang up in trains, 
and to bring to our notice in divers other places. 

The ill-bred fellow who has been lounging in the corner of the 
railway carriage takes his salivary glands with him when he steps 
out of it; but he leaves behind an unwelcome reminder of his 
former presence, which persists in its independent being and 
asserts its right to a place in the world of matter. Can any 
thoughtful man seriously maintain that the color seen and the 
sound heard are related to the brain of the boy, who sees the dog, 



250 Mind and Matter 

in any way analogous to this ? The man who sat in the corner 
might have occupied himself during his whole journey with 
thoughts of wholesale massacre ; lie might have called before his 
imagination the most hideous combinations of colors ; he might 
have hummed over in his mind the most unmelodious of tunes ; 
yet, on his exit, the place might have been taken contentedly by a 
timid man with artistic tastes. Of such things as these no trace 
remains, and no one expects to find a trace. Sounds, colors, and a 
whole world of other things that we may classify with these, are 
not collocations of matter which exist in space side by side with 
certain other collocations of matter which we call bodily organs. 
It is only mental confusion that can identify them with such. 

Perhaps some one will be tempted to point out once more that 
the functioning of the brain does result in certain material 
products which can be traced by the physiologist. There is 
a destruction of tissue which must be made good by reconstruc- 
tion. This is, of course, true. When the brain functions, there 
are waste products which pass into the blood and are ultimately 
eliminated from the body by other organs. But it should be 
noted that such products, when they are discovered, are not 
found to be in the least like those things which we have been 
discussing. They are not colors, they are not sounds, they are 
not memories of such. They are not to be identified with any 
of those things of which the man was conscious while his brain 
was functioning. The elements which compose them formed 
part of the man's body ; they were jostled out of the combina- 
tions in which they stood ; they were finally excreted. Of their 
existence during the whole process he has not had the faintest 
suspicion. For identifying them with the things of which he 
was conscious at the time there seems to be no excuse. 

Thus this vain talk of " secretions " may be unhesitatingly 
set aside when we are considering such things as the color of 
the dog as seen by the boy, or the sound of his bark as heard. 
Even the Democritean slurring over of the existence of sensations 
and of that reason which can alone discern the truth about the 
atoms and their motions seems preferable to such gross miscon- 
ception. Democritus recognized the existence of these things, 
but failed to find for them a place in his scheme of existence. 
The secretionist gives them a place in the system of things, but 
they cannot take tliat place without ceasing to be wliat they are. 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 251 

He denies them their own proper nature and confounds them 
with something else. 

It may be thought that it is an excess of zeal to spend even 
so much time as I have done in the criticism of this form of the 
materialistic doctrine. Why sally out in chase of the dodo, when 
that bird has disappeared from the face of the earth ? 

To this one may answer that this bird has not wholly disap- 
peared, but that specimens may still occasionally be met with in 
out-of-the-way corners. My own experience has been that they 
are more apt to be found in the medical profession than elsewhere, 
perhaps because that profession embraces a vast number of men 
who have some acquaintance with physiology and psychology, but 
only a limited number of whom can be legitimately expected to be 
possessed of philosophical acumen and to be thoroughly equipped 
with accurate information upon matters physiological and psycho- 
logical. 

And one may answer, in the second place, that the secretion- 
ist's misconception is but one of a type, and it may serve to throw 
light upon a whole group of errors to analyze the most striking 
instance to be found in the group. A more insidious form of the 
misconception is often made to lurk in the statement that what is 
somewhat loosely called thought is a " function " or " activity " of 
the brain, a statement which may seem not unsatisfactory to one 
who is ready to turn a deaf ear to all mention of secretions. One 
is reminded here of the old Greek notion of the soul as a harmony 
of the body, which notion, as readers of Plato will remember, was 
sometimes taken with serious literalness and supposed to be 
fraught with grave significance. 

But it is never mse to use a phrase without at least an at- 
tempt to determine with some accuracy what it really means. 
What are " functions " or " activities " of the brain ? To such vi- 
sion as we are supposing ourselves to possess, it is quite clear what 
the brain is. The dulness of our sense has been done away, 
and we see, as with the Democritean Reason, an army of atoms 
going through its evolutions with mechanical precision. It is 
not a mob, a mere rabble. We can trace in its infinite complex- 
ity relatively permanent groupings in the midst of incessant 
changes. Formation succeeds formation ; the individual units 
group themselves, divide, scatter, and re-form into new groups. 
A patient observation of what takes place, and a comprehension 



252 Mind and Matter 

of the mechanical laws which govern the actions of each, enable 
us to predict what groupings will appear upon the scene when the 
present arrangement has filled its moment and dropped into the 
nothingness of things past. 

These motions in matter, these groupings and regroupings of 
atoms, these are the functions or activities of the brain, in an 
unequivocal sense of the words. They are the only ones that 
display themselves before our eyes, and, as we have seen in the 
preceding chapter, they are the only ones needed by science to 
explain the whole series of positions taken, in the material world, 
by the body with which this brain is connected — in the instance 
above mentioned, the wild chase of the dog, the shouts of laughter, 
the wavings of the stick. 

Shall we say that the color seen and the sound heard are also 
functions of the brain ? And in this case shall we regard them as 
distinct and separate functions of a quite different kind, or shall we 
assume that they are identical with some of the motions which we 
see before us ? Shall we say that this particular clash of atoms 
is the color yellow, and that one is a sound? If we assert that 
such as these are functions of a quite different kind from motions, 
we seem to be stretching a familiar word to the point of breaking. 
We ought to recognize that, when we call things quite different 
by the same name, we are not justified in putting them into the 
same class, and in assuming that the one has been assigned its 
place in nature when the other has. On the other hand, if we 
maintain that colors and sounds are identical with certain atomic 
motions, we seem to be talking nonsense. The atomic motions 
we can see plainly before us. As well call a triangle an emo- 
tion of grief as call this particular clash of atoms 3'ellow. The 
atoms are not yellow and their motions certainly are not. If it 
is an error to confound a color or a sound with a material secre- 
tion, it is surely no less of an error to confound them with 
motions in matter. 

As a matter of fact even those who elect to speak of thought 
as a function of the brain do not exactly identify colors and 
sounds as seen and heard with motions in the constituents of 
the brain. They do not conceive those motions to be colored 
or resonant. They accept their own phrase loosely, and when 
cross-questioned usually have something to say about double- 
faced entities, the outside and the inside of things, etc. With 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 253 

these modifications of their doctrine we are not here concerned; 
what concerns us is the fact that any doctrine which maintains 
that science has to do only with matter in motion removes from 
the province of science many things which common sense and 
common experience insist upon as really existing. If science 
is to be thus circumscribed, then scientific knowledge carried 
to its extremest limit must wholly ignore much that we find in 
our experience, so much, indeed, that, were it dropped out 
altogether, we should not recognize our experience as our ex- 
perience at all. 

The more clearly one recognizes, therefore, just what is meant 
by the mechanism of nature, the more clearly one sees that there 
is no room in it for such things as color and sound as seen 
and heard. This world of mechanism is, indeed, the world of 
the primary qualities of matter dwelt upon by John Locke 
in his "Essay." From it all those elements of our experi- 
ence which are sometimes loosely called the secondary qualities 
of matter are to be carefully excluded. Colors, sounds, odors, 
etc., are not, as Locke expressly states, qualities of matter at 
all, and he insists that they do not resemble them. That some- 
thing in matter must correspond to them, he regards as self- 
evident, and this something he calls the secondary qualities of 
matter. But he defines these secondary qualities as powers 
which objects possess of arousing sensations in us by means of 
their primary qualities. Thus, in the world of matter, there is no 
real distinction between primary qualities and secondary. The 
secondary are seen to be nothing other than the primary — 
they are configurations of, or motions in, matter; those partic- 
ular motions which we connect with, and too often confound 
with, the hearing of sounds or the seeing of colors. That such 
configurations and motions should not be confused with the 
sounds heard or the colors seen Locke saw clearly. He made 
the latter effects of the former, but he had better sense than to 
suppose the two classes of things to be identical.^ 

The modern man, who has had the advantage of reading what 
men have written since touching the nature of our conception of 
matter, ought to be in still less danger of falling into such confu- 
sions. The world of matter and motion is a world given in terms 
of touch and movement sensations. It is a vast system built up 
1 Book II, Chapter VIII. 



254 Mind and Matter 

out of elements which have been selected from our experience 
as a whole, but Avhich by no means exhaust its rich diversity. 
It is a mere skeleton, a framework and nothing more. When it 
is recognized what the material world is in its ultimate constitu- 
ents — I speak psychologically and not physically — it is impos- 
sible to think that nothing exists save matter and motion. This is 
seen to be tantamount to the assertion that color sensations are 
identical with sensations of quite another class, which is palpably 
absurd.^ To regard as identical classes of experiences which are 
evidently dissimilar is inexcusable, and to dismiss as non-existent 
all classes of sensations except those which fit into a particular 
series, arbitrarily narrows the meaning of the word " existence " to 
a special use. Both in science and in common life we constantly 
speak of colors, sounds, and odors. We mean something when 
we do so. To declare such things to be non-existent is palpably 
contrary to common sense and to the accepted usages of speech. 

Thus we see that it is impossible for reflection to rest content 
with the Democritean world of atoms and void space, and to ask 
no questions touching those other things which Democritus recog- 
nizes but to which he explicitly denies a place in the system of 
things. It is impossible to be satisfied with a mechanical theory 
of the universe, however carefully elaborated by modern science, 
which simply ignores a large part of our experience, and regards 
its task as completed when it has reduced to order the remainder. 
One is constantly reminded that something remains to be explained. 
In common life we hear little of the atomic structure of things, 
and much of the color, the odor, the taste, of the apple or the 
peach. We speak of our wine as white or red, as sweet or sour. 
A bruised finger aches, and all notion of mechanism is driven from 
our thought by its maddening pulsation. These things stand in 
the foreground of our experience ; to overlook them seems absurd. 
To think of the world as composed exclusively of atoms in motion, 
one must banish the world, sit quietly in the dim light of one's 
study, glue one's eyes to the paper, and write oneself gradually 
into a frame of mind in which the abstractions of mechanics seem 

1 If any one chooses to distinguish between the material world " as given in terms 
of touch and movement sensation " and the real material world as it is, distinct 
from all sensation, it does not affect the question. It only emphasizes the absurdity 
of overlooking the existence of the "subjective." I must ask my reader to wait 
until he has read Chapter XXIII before coming to a final decision regarding my 
use of the word "sensation." 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 255 

the only realities. The first tap at the door, the first note of the 
finch in the tree outside, may easily remind one that the world is 
really painted in colors, and is not a monotony of black and white. 

It is the same when one talks with men of science, or reads an 
account of their experiments. We watch the chemist pour one 
colorless liquid into another. He has told us that the " resulting 
color " will be this or that, and his prediction seems to have been 
justified. The physiologist gives us a brief sketch of the anatomy 
of the eye and of the ear. He traces as well as he can their con- 
nections with the various parts of the brain. He then launches 
out into a far more extended discussion of sensations of color 
and sound — not brain-changes, but sensations of color and sound 
— as though such things really existed, were worthy of being 
discussed at prodigious length, and were not so cut off from molec- 
ular changes in the substance of the brain as to make it impossible 
to pass from the one to the other. 

As for the psychologist, whatever may be his enthusiasm for 
mechanism, and however closely he may ally himself to the student 
of physical science, he simply cannot speak at all without remind- 
ing us that there are other things in heaven and earth than motions 
in matter, than the clash of the Democritean atoms. If we ex- 
punge from his pages all reference to what does not form part 
of the mechanism we have been discussing, we leave most of them 
as white as when they went into the hands of the printer. Even 
the headings of the chapters are gone, and the title of the volume 
has become an empty sound. There remain some descriptions of 
apparatus, and an outline of the anatomy and physiology of the 
nervous system, the latter a mere shadow of its usual self as we 
find it set forth in the works of the physiologists. 

Very likely it will be objected that this devastation which is 
wrought in the sciences by insisting that they shall omit all 
reference to what cannot take its place in the world of matter 
and motion, has its origin in the fact that the sciences are as yet 
so imperfect. 

A science which does not know the actual changes which are 
taking place in the mechanism of the universe, must, if it is to talk 
at all, be allowed to talk about something else. Yet he who thus 
speaks may be conscious of the fact that, did he know more, he 
might speak in quite another way. The pouring of one liquid 
into another is a mechanical change. The chemical combinations 



256 Mind and Matter 

which result may also be regarded as mechanical changes. Such 
changes, which, of course, do not lie open to direct inspection, may 
be assigned their place in the cosmic series of causes and effects. 
One may speak of the " resulting color " without seriously intending 
to maintain that the color seen has its place in the series. It may 
be taken as merely representative of what has such a place, as 
a convenient handle by which to take up an occurrence which can- 
not readily be laid hold of in some better way. It is permissible 
to refer to " Monsieur Chose," when we do not know the man's real 
name. 

Similarly, our desolating ignorance of the intimate structure of 
the brain and of the changes which take place in it, may force the 
physiologist and the psychologist to talk of colors, sounds, odors, 
tastes, pleasures, pains, memory-images, concepts, and what not; 
but if they knew more of the mechanism of the human body, could 
they not describe all its activities without any reference to such 
things as these at all? Were science more advanced, could there 
not be a physiology, and even a psychology, that made no reference 
to such ? Could not these sciences study man as a mechanism, and 
content themselves with the knowledge of all that this mechanism 
could possibly do ? Certainly, if the mechanical view of the mate- 
rial universe is a true one, it is not permissible to follow the chain 
of mechanical causes a little way, abandon it at a certain point, 
and then return to it again, except as a last resort and a temporary 
expedient. One may deplore this expedient even while availing 
oneself of it. 

To the objection that the chain of mechanical causes and effects 
could, at a more advanced stage of science, be rendered more evi- 
dently complete, one need not care to bring an answer. I have 
above merely wished to point out the fact that, in the present state 
of the sciences, it is especially inexcusable to overlook the existence 
of all save the Democritean atoms and their motions, since tliat 
existence is forced upon one's attention at every turn. 

Nor is it without significance that it is possible, when we find 
the series of mechanical causes broken by our ignorance, to piece 
out its deficiencies by turning to something else. Certain things 
cannot be made to stand as representatives of certain others unless 
there be some true relation between the two classes. 

The importance of this relation is sufficiently evident, for it 
is possible for the plain man to interpolate into his series of me- 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 257 

chanical causes such things as sensations, which have no place in 
the above-described mechanical order, and yet to infer with a good 
deal of accuracy what occurrences will or will not find a place in 
the world of his experiences. It seems to him madness to deny 
that sensations and volitions can be the results and the causes 
of changes in the material world. The puncture caused by the 
mosquito gives rise to the sensation of itching, and this sensa- 
tion leads to his scratching the spot attacked. The fall of the 
apple from the tree causes in him certain visual sensations, and 
these visual sensations are the cause of his desiring to possess the 
apple, which desire sets his body in motion and leads to the 
appropriation of the fruit. The descent of the hammer wounds 
his finger ; this causes pain ; the pain causes facial contortion and 
the insertion of the wounded member into his mouth. The fact 
that such chains of antecedents and consequents do present them- 
selves within his experience, no man can with justice deny. He 
assumes them to be a series of causes and effects, and he re- 
gards it as unnecessary to isolate and set apart the merely mate- 
rial, even if the thought of doing so ever crosses his mind. 

The man of science is apt to speak w^ith rather more hesitation, 
even when he makes no deliberate attempt to view things with the 
eye of the philosopher. The chemist may talk of a "resultant 
color," and may even admit frankly that he thinks of color as an 
effect of physical causes, but we do not find him ready to admit 
that color can in any true sense be a cause of physical changes. 
The physiologist tells us that a common effect of the arrival at the 
central nervous system of impulses passing along afferent nerves is 
a change in consciousness, or a sensation.^ He also tells us that 
choice may be determined in some cases by intelligence,^ and that 
in an ordinary voluntary movement an intelligent consciousness is 
an essential element.^ He assures us, on the other hand, that, 
looking at the matter from a purely physiological point of view, 
" the real difference between an automatic act and a voluntary act 
is that the chain of physiological events between the act and its 
physiological cause is in the one case short and simple, in the 
other long and complex."* Psychologists divide themselves into 
classes ; the one class falling in with the opinion of the plain 
man, and the other regarding the series of mechanical causes as 

1 Foster, " Physiology," 6th ed.. Ill, pp. 850, 851. 

2 lUd., p. 909. 3 75^^.^ p. 1068. 4 ma^^ p. 1004. 



258 Mind and Matter 

unbroken. One cannot claim the authority of psychologists as a 
class for either doctrine. Finally, the logician tells us that it is 
the great aim of science to trace the relations of cause and effect 
which obtain in nature, but we rem.ark the fact that he does not 
hesitate to illustrate the inductive methods of scientilic research 
by a description of investigations into the " causes " of the irides- 
cent colors on mother-of-pearl, or on thin plates and films. ^ We 
ask at once, Does the logician mean to maintain that colors have 
their place in the natural order of causes and effects? Can they 
be the result of mechanical causes? Logicians speak as though 
they could, and they treat them accordingly. 

Of course, the adherent of the doctrine that the material world 
is a perfect mechanism will regard those whom I have above cited 
as in need of enlightenment. He will maintain that the opinions 
of the plain man must not be uncritically accepted as true ; and 
will point out that one may be a pretty good chemist, ph3^siologist, 
psychologist, or logician, without on that account being much of a 
philosopher. He will, moreover, call attention to the fact that, in 
special investigations of all sorts, it is permissible to use language 
in a way which is not strictly correct, provided that such a use of 
words serves our convenience and does not give rise to unavoidable 
misconception ; and he will remind us that one may reason well 
without being fully conscious of the true significance of the terms 
employed in one's reasonings. Those who enjoy the clearest vision, 
he will insist, and who best understand the course of the develop- 
ment which science is undergoing, will be in the least danger of 
falling into the error of supposing that the cosmic mechanism 
really needs to be patched with such unsubstantial stuff as colors 
or odors, pleasures, pains, or memorjMmages. 

But when he has said all this, he ought frankly to admit the 
significance of the fact, that such widespread error may exist 
without either in common life or in science revealing itself to 
be error by undeniably disastrous consequences. This can onl}- 
mean that those things which he has set aside as finding no place 
in the cosmic mechanism are, after all, intimately related to that 
mechanism. Where our knowledge of the mechanism is defective, 
it may be more or less satisfactorily pieced out by their aid, as we 
have seen. 

And it is quite clear that were our knowledge of the world of 

^ Jevons, " The Principles of Science," Chapter XIX, § 2. 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 259 

matter and motion so complete as to make it quite unnecessary to 
borrow such patches, this would not in the least imply that the 
world of sounds, colors, tastes, odors, and all the rest, would cease 
to exist and to be related to the world of matter and motion. In 
certain special investigations it would, it is true, be unnecessary 
to refer to such things, whereas this reference is at present un- 
avoidable. But to limit the sphere of science to such investiga- 
tions seems absurd. It is surely not the whole duty of man to fix 
his attention upon the ordering of sensations of touch and move- 
ment into a satisfactory mechanical system, to the complete neglect 
of experiences of every other sort. That these other experiences 
do not defy all attempts at arrangement is sufficiently clear from 
what has been said above. It seems, then, as though it ought to 
be the task of science, in the broad sense of that word, to reduce 
the whole of our experience, and not merely a part of it, to some 
sort of system. Anything less results in the mutilation, not the 
explanation, of the world in which we live. 

But how attain to such a view of the whole of our experiences 
as an interrelated system ? Surely one may sympathize with the 
Democritean, and admit that he is driven to his position by encoun- 
tering what seems a very real difficulty. Once admit that the 
material world is a perfect mechanism, and there appears to be no 
bridge by which one can pass from it to another world and back 
again. To the plain man the difficulty does not exist, for his real 
world is a composite thing in which material and non-material ele- 
ments are patched together to form what cannot exactly be called 
a mechanism, and yet resembles one in spots. To the nature of 
the connections between its different and discrepant elements 
he has given little thought; that they are somehow connected is 
enough for him. 

But he who desires to think clearly can scarcely rest content 
with a conception which seems to remain satisfactory only so long 
as it remains vague and obscure. He asks how he is to conceive 
this connection of the material and the non-material, and what is 
meant by their interaction. The more he thinks about the thing, 
the more it seems to him impossible that motions in matter should 
have as their causes anything save motions in matter. And yet, 
if this be so, what shall one do with colors, sounds, odors, and the 
rest? What shall one do with the subjective, with mind? Has 
it a place in the S3^stem of things, or has it not? As the "sj^stem 



260 Mitid and Matter 

of things " is pretty sure to mean, to one who has busied one- 
self chiefly with physical science, the cosmic mechanism, an exclu- 
sion from the latter may seem almost tantamount to a denial of 
existence. 

Such a denial is manifestly unjustifiable, and can scarcely be 
made by a man with open eyes ; but one may glide over the subject 
lightly, as the atomists appear to have done, and discourse chiefly 
of the material. Or one may half face the question, and justify 
one's exclusive occupation with the material by the assertion that 
thought is a bodily secretion, an assertion which we have seen to 
be a foolish one, and one which testifies rather to a man's respect 
for the mechanical order of things than to his powers of reflection. 
Finally, one may regard mental phenomena as the " inside " of 
molecular change, or call matter a " double-faced " entity, thus 
seeming to connect things of divers kinds which do not seem 
capable of being built, strictly speaking, into the one system. 

Just how much one may mean to say, when one uses such 
expressions, must depend upon one's clearness of vision. They 
may only indicate a vague recognition of the existence of the 
world ignored by the Democritean, coupled with the desire to 
incorporate it somewhat equivocally in the world of matter in 
motion. They may, on the other hand, mean more, and they 
deserve careful analysis. But the mere fact that one is tempted 
to use them is a sufficient indication of a recognition of the futility 
of attempting to limit the sphere of science to a description of the 
changes which take place in the material universe. It is an admis- 
sion that something exists save matter and motion, and a doctrine 
that makes this admission has advanced beyond the standpoint of 
pure materialism. 

It may, it is true, remain materialistic in feeling, and the 
amount of attention it bestows upon the subjective elements of 
experience may be quite inadequate. Still, it should be given 
credit for a truth which it sees but dimly. If it sees it at all, it 
cannot conscientiously object to the most strenuous efforts to throw 
light upon this dark corner in human knowledge. It cannot, in 
other words, frown upon the labors of the metaph3'sician, unless 
this worthy makes it quite plain that he assumes his premises with- 
out proper precautions, uses words and phrases without having 
carefully looked into their significance, draws conclusions without 
clearly recognizing what constitutes proof, or does any of those 



The Insufficiency of Materialism 261 

things that have so frequently made the word " metaphysician " 
stink in the nostrils of the prudent and the practical man. 

His task is not an imaginary one. It is set for him by the 
nature of our experience. Even Democritus unconsciously in- 
cites him to set about its accomplishment, in that he delivers 
into his hands certain things which unquestionably exist, in some 
sense of that word, and yet for which no place is provided in the 
world of existing things. 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE ATOMIC SELF 

Science has long been at work building up the conception of 
the material world as a mechanical system of things. Many 
hands have labored to rear the edifice, many still labor, and yet 
the pile has scarcely risen above its foundations. Only the eye 
of faith can see its towers and pinnacles rising in stately mag- 
nificence and dwell with pleasure upon the unity and harmony 
of the colossal structure. Those who are most deeply imbued 
with the spirit of science, and who enjoy that breadth of vision 
denied to the myopic eye of the mere specialist, are apt to exer- 
cise this faith and to see the world as a perfect mechanism, 
while frankly admitting that it is quite beyond the power of 
science to prove it to be such. On the other hand, there are 
those, and among them men of great scientific eminence, who 
do not believe that this faith rests upon a sure foundation. The 
world of matter, they maintain, will not be proved to be a perfect 
mechanism, because it is not such. 

But, whatever view we may take of the world of matter, how- 
ever independent we may conceive it to be, we are nevertheless 
forced to recognize the existence of a realm of minds. The man 
who insists that nothing exists save matter is foolish — about as 
foolish as the man who insists that nothing exists save mind. 
The plain man stands between the two and finds himself in a 
composite world in which things material and things mental play 
their proper r61e without crowding each other out of existence. 
That the chair upon which he sits, the table at which he writes, 
the pen which he holds, are material things, it seems to hira 
trivial to doubt. That there is such a thing as mechanism he 
can prove by pulling out his watch. On the other hand, it is 
he that pulled out the watch, a thing that can feel, think, re- 
member, will — in short, a mind. And he cannot conceive any 
man in his senses to come seriously to the conclusion that he 
alone possesses a mind. 

202 



The Atomic Self 263 

That he is right in maintaining the distinction between mat- 
ter and mind and in holding to the existence of both, careful 
analysis will only succeed in making more certain. The phi- 
losopher who denies his position may see some truth that he 
does not see, but his denial rests upon an imperfect apprehension 
of the truth. We have on our hands a world of matter and a 
realm of minds ; neither can be declared non-existent ; the only 
question is, What shall we do with the two ? I have said that, to 
the plain man, the difficulty does not appear to be a serious one, 
because he builds the two into one system, or, at least, into some- 
thing resembling a system. He treats minds very much as if 
they were material atoms and could influence the latter as these 
influence each other. But to the man who has come to look 
upon the material world as a perfect mechanism the problem is 
a far more serious one, for such a conception of the interaction 
of mind and matter as the above seems to make havoc of the 
notion of mechanism. 

So serious is the difficulty that some of those whose acuteness 
and whose learning are undisputed have come back from a study 
of what many philosophers have had to say touching the problem, 
with a disposition to rest content with the position of the plain 
man as being, on the whole, the most satisfactory. The plain 
man appears to give a plain answer to the question, and one not 
out of harmony with our common experience of things. Why not 
accept it and let it go at that ? The position seems by no means 
an unreasonable one, at first sight, at least. If, in taking it, one 
is compelled to deny the assertion of certain persons that the 
material world is a perfect mechanism, it is easy to point out that 
these persons can give no adequate proof of their assertion and 
to hold that they may very well be in the wrong. 

But it is evidently unwise to adopt a position without making 
a careful examination into all that that implies. It is quite pos- 
sible that such an examination will reveal that one has passed 
from bad to worse in abandoning philosophy for common sense. 
Of course, one cannot expect the plain man to realize clearly all 
that his doctrine implies. We must, hence, try to make clear to 
ourselves what he does believe, and then judge whether such 
beliefs with their implications are what we should elect to adopt 
as a satisfactory solution of the problem of the relation between 
matter and mind. 



264 Mind and Matter 

Here I should premise, in the first place, that I lay myself 
open to easy criticism in trying to make clear Avhat is in its nature 
vague and fluctuating. A man may hold a thing in mind so 
dimly and vaguely that he may fail to recognize any clear thought 
whatever as the thing he had in mind, and may resent having it 
attributed to him as his own. Moreover, the plain man is not 
one, but many, and although he may, for certain purposes, be 
taken generically, he presents specific differences which are not 
without their significance. 

I should premise, in the second place, that by the plain man I 
do not mean the very plain man, but the man who has some 
opinions, at least, on the subject of mind and matter. It must be 
admitted that he has not gathered his opinions independently from 
his own experience. Such opinions never are gathered indepen- 
dently. They exude from old philosophies ; they are absorbed into 
theological and ethical systems ; they leave their traces upon 
language and literature ; they are taken up again, worked over, 
and incorporated into text-books for the instruction of young men; 
they become a part of the common thought of the race, and in 
the mind of every man of a moderate degree of culture they find 
•^ lodgment as part of that heritage from the past which he has 
accepted as he has accepted his social prejudices and his elemen- 
tary notions of rights and duties. It may seem to a man that he 
has direct evidence in his own experience that such opinions are 
true. He should remember that it also seems to him that he has 
direct evidence that he does his thinking with his head, and not 
with some other part of his body. Yet it took the race a long 
time to discover the true significance of the brain in the animal 
economy, and many generations of men lived and died without 
being impressed with this direct evidence at all. 

We may, hence, regard the opinions of the plain man on such 
subjects as the echoes of past philosophies ; echoes which he takes 
for the voice of truth, and which seem to him to be just interpreta- 
tions of what is given in his experience. If we go back to these 
philosophies, we shall often find labored attempts to make reason- 
ably clear what he is content to leave wholly vague. It may, 
consequently, be objected that any attempt to state clearly the 
opinions of the plain man on the subject of mind and matter and 
their relation to each other must result in setting these opinions 
aside and treating, instead, of those philosophical doctrines in 
which they have had their origin. 



The Atomic Self 265 

The objection is not without force, and yet it is difficult to see 
how one can make clear what a man believes dimly and vaguel}^ 
in any other way than by setting forth what his words would 
mean to him did he see things under a light less dim and un- 
certain, or what they have meant to others more given to the 
habit of reflection. It is not worth while to discuss a man's 
opinions, if it is understood from the outset that the discussion 
must leave the whole subject as vague as it was before. If any 
plain man feels aggrieved at my attributing to him doctrines 
which he is not conscious of holding, I beg him to assume that 
my words have reference to another and not to him individually. 
An experience, extending over a considerable number of years, 
with successive classes of college students representing, on the 
whole, the more cultivated classes in the community, has con- 
firmed me in the opinion that there are certain philosophical tenets 
touching the nature of the mind held with a good deal of unanimity 
even by those who have done no reading in the works of the 
philosophers, and have no idea of the original sources of the 
doctrines to which they hold. They are comprehended vaguely ; 
those who maintain them are often thrown into confusion by the 
first objection urged against any or all of them ; but they are 
nevertheless held to with a good deal of tenacity. These tenets 
I take the liberty of calling a part of the philosophy of the plain 
man. Under this heading I include the following beliefs: — 

1. That the mind is in some sense in the body. 

2. That it acts and reacts with matter. 

3. That it is a substance with attributes. 

4. That it is non-extended and immaterial. 

In these statements there is nothing that strikes the average 
man as absurd or incredible. Taken together they describe what 
may fairly be called the atomic self^ that is, the self or mind vaguely 
conceived after the analogy of a material atom. It is true that the 
thing is expressly affirmed to be immaterial, but that only means 
that the analogy is recognized to be somewhat imperfect. 

But one's satisfaction with such statements as these can only 
endure so long as one does not subject them to careful scrutiny 
and ask after their precise meaning. In what sense can the mind 
be regarded as in the body ? and what is intended by the statement 
that it acts and reacts with matter ? 

Let us ask the plain man to look at the boy chasing the dog. 



266 Mind and Matter 

whom I have discussed in an earlier chapter,^ with the sharpness of 
vision there supposed possible. What does he see ? He sees an 
enormously complicated system of material atoms changing their 
space-relations to each other unceasingly, and in such changes 
obeying mechanical laws. The whole system of atoms constitutes 
what we call the boy's body. Each atom is plainly and unequivo- 
cally in the body, for it is clearly a member of the group, and stands 
in such and such space-relations to the other members. The word 
*^ in " has no doubtful meaning when one is speaking of material 
things. My papers are in my desk, that is, they occupy certain 
definite portions of space, and the wood which composes the desk 
occupies certain other portions on this side and on that. My body 
is in this room, that is, it occupies a position between the walls, 
can by moving in this direction touch one of them, and by moving 
in that, touch another. An analysis of the conceptions of matter 
and of space reveals that when we speak of a thing as being here or 
there we are simply assigning to a given group of tactual sensations 
its position in the vast system of tactual and movement sensations 
which constitutes the real world in space and time.^ If I choose to 
locate a mathematical point in this room, I treat the point as I 
would treat an atom, and I believe that a line might be drawn 
from one wall through the point in question to another wall. It 
seems, then, that to be anywhere, in an intelligible sense of the 
word, a thing must be material. It must form a part of the mate- 
rial system of things, and this it cannot do without being itself 
material. 

Now does any one suppose that any degree of acuteness in 
vision would reveal the mind to be in the boy's body as an atom 
of matter is in it? Such a supposition seems to be quite excluded 
by the statement that the mind is immaterial. In what sense, 
then, can the mind be in the body? A careful examination of 
the plain man's opinion upon this subject reveals the fact that he 
really does assign to the mind, dimly and vaguely, an atomic ''in"- 
ness, while refusing to accept all that this implies — perhaps, even, 
while holding to what flatly contradicts this. 

The doctrine that the mind is in the body is venerable with age. 
At first it was a mind that was very unequivocally in; it was com- 

1 Chapter XV. 

2 This use of the word "sensation" is subject to the criticisms contained in 
Chapter XXIII. 



The Atomic Self 267 

posed of fine round atoms, Mghly movable atoms, etc. It could 
be inhaled and exhaled, and might escape through a gaping wound, 
as wine spouts through the rent wine-skin. It was a kind of 
matter and nothing more, having the same right to occupy space 
that has any other form of matter. Afterward it was for centu- 
ries still in the body, but in a much more indefinite and inconsist- 
ent fashion. It was wholly in the whole body, and wholly in 
every part. 

This scholastic doctrine I have criticised earlier,^ and it is not 
necessary for me to dilate upon it here further than to say that, 
to have this collocation of words mean anything to him, a man must 
think vaguely of "in"-ness, in the proper sense of the word, and 
must keep what he has in mind very vague. He must think of an 
immaterial atom, which by virtue of its being an atom can be some- 
where, and by virtue of its immateriality can be nowhere in par- 
ticular, but rather everywhere in general. It is an echo of this 
doctrine that comes before us as the opinion of the plain man, 
although he has never heard the words tota in toto^ and may be 
shocked by their meaning as explained to him. He thinks of 
the mind as in the body, much as a material atom is in the body, 
and yet he does not think that it would be open to direct inspection, 
however acute one's power of vision. He hesitates to localize it 
very definitely, and would be unwilling to speak of it as exactly at 
the middle of the straight line joining this atom and that. He 
shakes his head over the suggestion that, if the mind really is in 
the body, a line might conceivably be drawn through two different 
brains in such a way as to pass through two different minds, whose 
distance apart might, thus, be accurately determined. 

But it may be urged that, however indefinite the plain man's 
ideas may be, it is scarcely fair to foist upon him the scholastic 
doctrine of the ubiquity of the mind in the body. The objection 
is perhaps just, for that doctrine is not completely represented in 
the echoes of it which come back to us from most men's minds. 
Yet it should not be forgotten that the more completely one elimi- 
nates from one's thought the notion of this absurd ubiquity, and 
the more earnestly one strives to make the presence of the mind 
in the body a comprehensible thing, the more plain does it become 
that what one has in mind is an atomic self, a minute material self, 
which is present in the body as any material atom is present in a 

1 Chapter V. 



268 Mind and Matter 

group of such atoms. We can see this well illustrated in the case 
of Descartes, whose acquaintance with the mechanism of the body 
led him to attempt an emendation of the scholastic doctrine. He 
did not deny the ubiquity of the mind, for he was willing to assert, 
in accordance with the orthodox tradition, that it was united to all 
the parts of the body " conjointement." Nevertheless, he assigned 
to the mind a "siege principale " in the little pineal gland in the 
middle of the brain. Listen to what he has to say touching its 
behavior in this its inner sanctum : — 

" Let us here, then, conceive of the soul as having her chief 
seat in the little gland which is in the middle of the brain, whence 
she radiates to all the rest of the body by means of the spirits, the 
nerves, and even the blood, which, participating in the impressions 
of the spirits, can carry them through the arteries to all the mem- 
bers. And let us remember what has been said above of the 
mechanism of the body, to wit, that the little threads of our 
nerves are so distributed to all its parts, that, on occasion of divers 
movements excited in those parts by the objects of sense, they 
open in divers ways the pores of the brain, which brings it about 
that the animal spirits contained in these cavities enter in different 
ways into the muscles, by means of which they can move the mem- 
bers in all the different ways in which they are capable of being 
moved; and also that all other causes, that can mo\e the spirits 
diversely, can conduct them to divers muscles. Let us add, too, 
that the little gland which is the chief seat of the soul is so sus- 
pended between the cavities that contain these spirits, that it can 
be moved by them in as many different ways as there are different 
sensible qualities in the objects ; yet that it can also be moved in dif- 
ferent ways by the soul, whose nature is such that it receives as 
many different impressions, i.e. has as many different perceptions, 
as there are different movements in this gland. The mechanism 
of the body is so constructed that, simply from the fact that this 
gland is moved in divers ways by the soul, or by whatever cause 
may be, it pushes the spirits which surround it toward the pores of 
the brain, which conduct them by the nerves to the muscles, and 
thus makes them move the members." ^ 

" Thus, when the soul wills to call anything to remembrance, 
this volition brings it about that the gland, inclining itself suc- 

^ " Les Passions fie PAme," Art. 84. The "spirits" here referred to are, of 
course, the " animal spirits," and nothing immaterial. 



The Atomic Self 269 

cessively in different directions, pushes the spirits toward divers 
parts of the brain, until they find the part which has the traces 
that the object which one wishes to recollect has left there. For 
these traces are nothing except that the pores of the brain, through 
which the spirits have formerly taken their course because of the 
presence of the object, have acquired thereby a greater facility 
than the others of being opened again in the same way by the 
spirits which return to them. Thus these spirits meeting these 
pores enter more easily into them than into the others, by which 
means they excite a peculiar movement in the gland, which repre- 
sents to the soul the same object and makes it conscious that it is 
the one it wishes to recollect." ^ 

Can anything be more clearly material than this little mind 
that sits in the pineal gland? It has its definite place among 
other material things ; it appears to be able to push and be pushed 
like the veriest bit of matter. Its presence in the body does not 
seem at all incomprehensible, for it does not appear to be in any 
wise different from the presence of a pen between a man's fingers, 
or the presence of a human body in a room. If one goes on to say 
that the mind is wholly without extension, is immaterial, and the 
like, one's thought becomes once more somewhat confused, for one 
is affirming material presence and in the same breath denying that 
the thing present is really material. But if one's thought is 
sufficiently vague, the contradiction is not unpleasantly apparent, 
and may conveniently be overlooked. The scholastic doctrine 
tries to make too clear what is meant by immaterial presence ; it 
stirs up the contradiction and makes it growl, striking fear to the 
heart of the beholder. Descartes, in his doctrine of the soul's 
seat, emphasized the presence^ and passed over the difficulty about 
its being immaterial. It goes without saying that if one empha- 
sizes both sides of the inconsistent doctrine, and makes both clear, 
the result cannot but be disconcerting — except to the chosen few 
who have embraced a philosophy of contradictions, and rejoice in 
the absurdity of the conclusions to which their reasonings conduct 
them. 

That the attempt to make at all clear the nature of the pres- 
ence of the mind in the body reveals that what is really at the 
heart of the plain man's thought is a material presence, may be 
equally well illustrated by taking a modern instance. No one 
1 " Les Passions de I'Ame," Art. 42. 



270 Mind and Matter 

kept closer to the philosophy of the plain man than the late Dr. 
McCosh. His works have appealed to a very large number of 
cultivated persons, not specialists in philosophy, as embodying 
the most sensible opinions, and the most reasonably conservative, 
on many subjects with which the philosopher deals. He has 
never been accused of being a materialist, and he certainly never 
meant to lend his countenance to those who incline to this type 
of thought. Yet when he comes to speak of mind and body, and 
makes the effort to be a little explicit, he is capable of writing as 
follows : — 

'' The mind is so constituted as to attain a knowledge of body 
or of material objects. It may be difficult to ascertain the exact 
point or surface at which the mind and body come together and 
influence each other, in particular, how far into the body (Des- 
cartes without proof thought it to be in the pineal gland), but it 
is certain that when they do meet mind knows body as having its 
essential properties of extension and resisting energy." ^ 

Here we find the scholastic ubiquity stripped away. The 
mind is not in the body "in general," but is located at some un- 
known distance within the skin. It can meet matter ; it can come 
together with it, possibly at a point, possibly at a surface. jNIust 
it not be a material mind that can act thus? In contemplating 
the boy's brain as a swarm of atoms, we can at least conceive any 
two of them as meeting each other. They can lie side by side in 
space, with no room between them. They can touch each other. 
Whether atoms do actually ever touch each other is not a question 
with which we need concern ourselves here. We can conceive 
that they do, and we can use the expressions ''come together" 
and "meet" in a perfectly intelligible sense. But suppose one 
of the atoms to be immaterial, that is, suppose it not to be an 
atom, a thing that can be touched. What can we mean by a 
meeting between a thing that can be touched and a thing that 
cannot? They can certainly not touch each other, and if not 
that, what do the}^ do ? It is perfectly evident that, in so far as 
Dr. McCosh's conception seems to the reader satisfactory, it is 
because he has emphasized the presence of the mind in the usual 
sense of the word " presence," and has passed over the difficulties 
which arise out of the attempt to combine with this the notion 
of immateriality. 

1 " First and Fuiulamental Truths," N.Y., 1880, Part II, Book I, Chapter II. 



The Atomic Self 271 

And if, when one emphasizes the notion of immateriality, that 
of the presence of the mind fades out into utter indefiniteness, 
what becomes of the conception of interaction ? We can conceive 
of a new atom being brought into the group of atoms which con- 
stitute a human body, and of its interacting with them. This 
means that it and the others approach to or recede from each 
other in ways that can be explained by a reference to mechanical 
laws. Interaction in this sense seems out of the question where 
one is no longer dealing with material things. 

But in what sense, then, can we speak of the interaction of 
mind and body ? It is easy to say that when the mind wills, such 
and such changes take place in the material world ; but to say 
this is simply to go back to the common experience that there is 
such a thing as volition, and that this is in some way related to 
the changes that take place in the world of material things. This 
experience no one cares to deny. It is admitted as frankly by 
those who regard the world of matter as a perfect mechanism, as 
it is by the interactionist. From this experience to the doctrine 
of the atomic self in the pineal gland or elsewhere is a very long 
step, and one never made by the plain man independently. When 
he makes it, he has passed from experience to philosophical theory, 
and it is perfectly just that this philosophical theory should be 
expected to stand or fall according as it succeeds in explaining 
or fails to explain the experience which it undertakes to make 
comprehensible. 

It is, then, right that we should ask how this atomic self is to 
be conceived as setting in motion material atoms. What is its 
volition ? Shall we think of it as a motion ? If we do, we are 
back again within the realm of matter. Shall we deny it to be a 
motion, and hold that it is a peculiar and indescribable occurrence 
which takes place within the self, and wholly within the self? 
Then how shall we conceive this change within an immaterial 
atom to bring about motions in material atoms ? The immaterial 
atom is not spatially present, in any intelligible sense of those 
words ; the change which has taken place is wholly within it ; and 
yet it is to be regarded as the cause of motions in matter. If this 
does not strike the plain man as a serious difficulty, it is because 
he sees so dimly that he is unable to recognize a difficulty when he 
meets one. 

But to those who have given the subject careful thought, the 



272 Mind and Matter 

difficulty of patching up a mechanism with immaterial cogs and 
couplings has seemed an enormous one. Descartes appeared to 
have made reasonably comprehensible the interaction of mind and 
body when he placed the former in the pineal gland, where it 
could, so to speak, hold in its hand all the strings of the machine. 
On the other hand, Descartes had declared the mind to be non- 
extended, and had made its essence to consist in thought. How 
could such an entity be conceived to possess a hand material enough 
to hold material strings at all ? This problem had to be faced by 
Descartes' successors, and, the notion of immateriality winning 
the day over that of material presence, they felt compelled to deny 
that it could hold the strings. The mind wills, said one, but it 
cannot, thereby, directly affect matter ; on occasion of its volition, 
God brings about changes in material things. The mind perceives 
things, said another, but not by virtue of their directly affecting 
it ; it sees things in God. The difficulty is as great now as it ever 
was, and if the plain man is not driven to such extremes by tlie 
inconsistency of his doctrine, it is, as I have said, because he does 
not greatly emphasize the notion of immateriality. His explana- 
tion of the interaction of mind and matter can only seem to him 
an explanation in so far as his thinking is materialistic. No man 
would attempt to fill in a gap in a series of colors by the insertion 
of a smell clearly recognized to be such. But a man might talk 
of completing his color-series in this abnormal way, if he dimly 
conceived of a smell as being some kind of a color. 

It is, hence, sufficiently clear that it is easy to conceive this 
immaterial atom as present in and interactive with the bod}^ only 
so long as one dimly thinks of it as material. When one is careful 
to eliminate from one's thought every suggestion of the material, 
all positive content seems to vanish. 

Nor is there a difficulty only with the conceptions of presence 
and interaction. If it is true that it is hard to conceive of the 
atomic self as having a r61e to play in the management of the 
bodily mechanism, it is no less true that it is hard to frame any 
idea, which shall have even an approach to clearness, of the nature 
of this immaterial entity and its relation to its ideas. 

We are told that it is an immaterial substance and that it 
possesses attributes. But what, in general, is a substance, and 
what is its relation to its attributes ? If we search curiously into 
this obscure notion, we are carried back many centuries in the 



The Atomic Self 273 

history of philosophy, and we realize that the opinions of the plain 
man have their roots in a remote antiquity. We see that it has 
seemed to many generations of thinking men too evident to require 
proof, that each thing must consist of a substance v^ith its qualities 
or attributes. The qualities are color, form, hardness, taste, smell, 
and the like, in the case of certain things, and thinking, remember- 
ing, willing, and the like, in the case of others. The substance is 
of a more retiring nature, and does not present itself to direct 
inspection. Nevertheless, it is there, and it is indispensable. It 
is substance^ substratum, that which underlies the qualities, that 
which has them. It exists in itself — per se suhsistit — and they 
exist in it as dependent existences. 

If one will imagine a pin-cushion stripped of those qualities by 
which we commonly recognize it to be a pin-cushion, its exten- 
sion, its hardness, its weight, its color, etc., and if we will permit 
it to retain only the property of holding the pins which are stuck 
(? !) into it, we shall have something that at least suggests the sub- 
stance which busied philosophers all through the Middle Ages, 
and busies a number of them even at the present time. It has sur- 
vived some very serious shocks in its day. When Descartes made 
a feint of sweeping aside all the philosophical prejudices which 
had come down to him from the past, he was unable to rid himself 
of this notion. He made the essence of matter to consist in exten- 
sion, and the essence of mind to consist in thought, but these es- 
sences are not in themselves complete and independent. They 
drag with them as their shadow the substance or substratum which 
the " natural light " (a euphemism for inveterate prejudice) con- 
vinced Descartes must accompany every quality or attribute. ^ The 
substances thus brought in play no part in the Cartesian philoso- 
phy; throughout the whole four acts they remain behind the 
scenes. Still they are assumed to be present, and to be in some 
obscure way indispensable to the drama. 

One of the most serious attacks ever made upon this ghostly 
pin-cushion was made by one of its friends. When John Locke 
undertook to make clear the distinction between ideas, qualities 
of things, and substance, he did the last of these a great disser- 
vice. He made it too clear that, when one has carefully dis- 
tinguished between qualities and substance and has set all 
qualities of whatever sort on the one side and naked substance on 
1 " Principia Philosophiae," I, ii. 



274 Mind and Matter 

the other, the nakedness of the thing is so complete as to resemble 
the emptiness of a vacuum. One is tempted to ask whether one 
has anything left at all. We have no idea what substance is, 
said Locke ; we have only an indefinite notion of what it does. It 
is a " we know not what," and its function is to hold together the 
bundle of qualities which constitute the things we do know. The 
idea could not have been gained from any experience whatever, 
and its existence cannot be logically defended.^ 

Surely an entity at such a pass has no excuse for existing ; we 
do not know what it is ; we have not the faintest idea how it can 
do what it is supposed to do ; the fact of its existence has been 
assumed without apparent justification. It appears to be made 
out of whole cloth, if so mere a nothing can be said to be made out 
of cloth at all, and did it possess a particle of self-respect it would 
expire and be done with. Curiously enough, it does not expire 
even in the pages of Locke, which contain poison enough to make 
away with a dozen such ; and it is not surprising that it lurks in the 
obscurer corners of the mind of the plain man, who may quite fail 
to see that it is living on through sheer effrontery and in spite of 
the fact that it has logically died and been buried. ' 

The interesting question is. Why does it live on ? Why does 
it seem worth while for men to insist upon the existence of so mere 
a nonentity ? This question we can answer by pointing out that 
this nonentity is a vampire which draws from the qualities, with 
the sum total of which it is supposed to be contrasted, the few 
drops of blood which nourish its equivocal being. 

John Stuart Mill, in his remarkable chapter on " The Psycho- 
logical Theory of the Primary Qualities of Matter," has insisted 
that, when we speak of material substance, we really have in mind 
the touch-qualities of a thing, qualities which, taken together, form, 
as it were, an inner nucleus, to which we refer all the other quali- 
ties.2 His analysis is quite in the line of modern psychological 
investigations, which recognize that the real world in space and 
time is a world revealed in terms of touch-movement sensations. 
But Mill might profitably have brought out more clearly the fact 
that, when we distinguish between a thing and its qualities, the 
thing is not clearly recognized by us to be composed of qualities of 
any sort. It is indefinitely thought of as the possibility of all the 

1 "Essay/' Book I, Chapter IV, § 18 ; Book II, Chapter XXIII, §4. 

2 " An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," Chapter XIII. 



The Atomic Self 275 

qualities, the centre from which thej emanate, the bond of union 
between them. It is the group as a group contrasted with the 
individuals which compose it. Manifestly, if we carefully put all 
the individuals aside, the group disappears and we are left without 
a residue. 

This is what Locke did and he left himself emptj^-handed. 
But in so far as Locke still believed in substance, and indefi- 
nitely thought of it as a real existence, he did what is done by the 
plain man, he made an imperfect abstraction, leaving enough of 
the qualitative to prevent his substance from becoming a mere 
nothing. He was, of course, inconsistent, but inconsistency comes 
to be regarded as almost a prerogative of the philosopher by those 
who read much in the history of philosophy. Material substance 
remained to Locke enough of a touch-thing to be in this place or 
that, to be moved about. He thought of it vaguely as one thinks 
of things that can be touched, and there certainly was dimly pres- 
ent to his mind the core of tactual qualities upon which Mill dwells 
and which he himself in his moments of clearer thought set over 
against substance as something to be contrasted with it. 

With the useful distinction between substance and qualities I 
have no quarrel. I wish merely to point out that it is very easy 
to misconceive the significance of the distinction and to suppose 
that the substance is a something that can be set over against the 
qualities in their totality. It is a little as though one distin- 
guished between the river and all the water that ever flows in the 
river. And when one falls into the error of treating substance in 
this wa}^ it is clear that one gains an indefinite meaning for what 
would otherwise be an empty word, by borrowing something from 
the bundle of qualities with which the substance is contrasted. 
When the plain man distinguishes between the table and the quali- 
ties of the table, his words undoubtedly mean something to him. The 
table as substance is not to be accepted as a mysterious and unan- 
alyzable datum in his experience. It is perfectly possible to ana- 
lyze the conception, and to show what elements are present in his 
thought. There is present in a vague and shadowy way that core 
of touch-qualities emphasized by Mill, and this is present even 
when he insists that he is not thinking of qualities at all. Were 
it not present, he would not treat substance as he does, giving it a 
local habitation, and thinking of it as in things. 

That this is in his thought when he talks of material substance, 



276 Mind and Matter 

and that this content accounts for the satisfaction with which he 
comes back to a conception which would otherwise be to him a 
meaningless abstraction, is sufficiently clear. But what has been 
said above about the general tendency to give the atomic self a 
materialistic presence in the body makes it also evident that this 
is present in his thought even when he is talking about a substance 
which he assumes to be immaterial. Surely this is illegitimate in 
the highest degree. An immaterial self must not be represented 
in our minds by any group of touch-qualities, however indefinite. 
How, then, shall we think it ? 

The problem is a very serious one indeed. How important a 
part the touch-movement sensations play in a man's notion of ma- 
terial substance, he can make clear to himself by trying consistently 
to carry out the Lockian abstraction. Here is this table : it is 
colored, hard, extended. One may think of these qualities as 
inhering in a substance. Now abstract in thought the color. The 
table seems to remain; it is a table in the dark. But abstract 
every degree of hardness, and all extension. The table seems to 
disappear completely. Yet the hardness and the extension are 
assumed to be qualities, and distinct from the substance which 
underlies them. Nevertheless, in their absence, the substance 
evaporates. Is the substance in itself extended ? or is extension 
only one of its qualities ? If it is not in itself extended, how can 
it "hold together" this whole expanse of table-top? How can it 
be, in any intelligible sense of the word, a substratum P One can- 
not spread a non-extended entity under an expanse of anything, 
and if it is not necessary for the substance to be spread under the 
qualities in any sense at all, why may not the substance of that 
door support the qualities of this table as well as the qualities of 
that door ? One who travels this road may easily reach the point 
of maintaining that there is only one substance, and this is next 
door to maintaining that there is no substance at all, at least in any 
sense of the word at all analogous to that in which it has been used 
in the preceding discussion. 

Now when a man talks of an immaterial substance he almost 
forces himself to a Lockian thorouofhness of abstraction in his 
treatment of substance. The dim core of touch-qualities which 
has inconsistently remained in his thought and has prevented him 
from groping in mere emptiness is threatened with total extinction. 
How is he to think even dimly of this immaterial substance ? He 



The Atomic Self 277 

feels impelled to assert, in accordance with the ancient tradition, 
that it is simple and non-extended. But these negative determi- 
nations are just the knife that should cut him off from the vague 
materialistic content that gives its meaning to his conception of 
substance. 

His only recourse is to retain at all hazards a little meaning, 
and allow his thought to grow still dimmer than it was before. If 
his material substance was the shade of a group of material quali- 
ties, his mental substance, the atomic self, is the shade of a shade. 
So dim is it and so unreal, that he has not the least expectation of 
attaining to any clear ideas regarding it, and he may even resent 
the attempt to set it in a sharper light. His 'notions of it and its 
ideas and activities are a mere mess of inconsistencies and incom- 
prehensibilities, and with this mess he is content because he does 
not believe that consistency and clearness can justly be looked for 
in this corner of the realm of human knowledge. 

When, therefore, one talks of abandoning the speculations of 
the philosophers and of coming back to the more sober conceptions 
of the plain man, it is right that we should ask him to open his 
eyes and see to what he is coming back. He is not coming back 
to experience, i.e. to uninterpreted experience. He is abandoning 
certain speculations for certain others, which, by no means satis- 
factory in themselves, yet seem satisfactory to a large number of 
persons, because they are matter of tradition and have come to fit 
their habits of thought as an old shoe fits the foot. 

That there is nothing even moderately clear in this doctrine is 
written all over its face. We have seen that when we ask what 
the atomic ira materialistic self is and how we are to conceive it, no 
answer is forthcoming. It appears to be a shadow of a materialis- 
tic shadow. When we ask how it can be present in the body, it 
becomes evident that, in so far as it is thought of as present, it is 
thought of as material. Manifestly we must not think of it as ma- 
terial. When we ask how it interacts with matter, no one even 
pretends to give us information. 

If, now, we turn in desperation to inquire at least how we are 
to conceive its relation to its own ideas, we fare no better. What do 
we mean when we say that it has ideas ? May we regard the ideas 
as minute pictures that exist in or on the surface of this substance? 
A good many intelligent persons can be brought to confess, by 
means of a little questioning, that they are apt to represent the 



278 Mind and Matter 

tiling to themselves in this way. But a moment's reflection makes 
it apparent that this will not serve even to give a hint of the rela- 
tion which must be conceived to obtain between the atomic self 
and its ideas. 

That which is perfectly simple and non-extended cannot have 
an inside and an outside, and it is not conceivable that anything 
should be either in it or on it, in any intelligible sense of those 
words. Moreover, the ideas themselves do not appear to be sim- 
ple If I close my eyes and call up in imagination a barber's pole, 
it seems to stand before me as an extended thing in which white lies 
beside red and red beside white. Does it mean anything whatever 
to talk of this composite something as either in or on a non-extended 
and simple substance? 

To be sure, I may maintain that the imaginary barber's pole 
only seems to be extended, and is not really extended at all; 
but if I do this I fall headlong into a difi&culty quite as grave as 
the one I am seeking to avoid. How can that which is quite 
simple and non-extended seem to have part out of part? Hiis 
it really no parts at all ? Am I fed with pure illusion, and is the 
white not really different and distinct from the red and the red 
from the white ? One may diminish the size of a thing and yet 
retain certain characteristics which make it possible to distinguish 
it as a thing of a given class. A small picture of a horse and a 
large one may both be recognized to be pictures of a horse. But 
if we annihilate altogether the extension of the picture of a horse, 
if we conceive it to shrink into the nothingness of a mathematical 
point, this simple and non-extended something has ceased to be 
a picture of a horse at all. It is inconceivable that it should 
represent any creature in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, 
or in the waters under the earth. 

When, therefore, the plain man loosely talks of ideas as small 
pictures, he may be speaking unwisely, but he is not talking mere 
nonsense. It is reserved for him to do this when, laboring under 
the delusion that it is his duty to put these ideas in or on a non- 
extended self, he affirms of them absolute simplicity in the hope 
that this may render his task a less desperate one. We must 
admit, in his justification, that it does seem somewhat plausible to 
maintain that it is more difficult to conceive of an extended thing 
as existing in or on a non-extended thing than to conceive of a 
non-extended thing as doing this. Still, men have more than one 



The Atomic Self 279 

idea at a time, and ho who has reduced his ideas to punctual 
insignificance as a preliminary to incarcerating them in their space- 
less cell, must still ask himself how two or more ideas thus bottled 
can be conceived to remain distinct and distinguishable. 

When brought to bay by questions, the plain man may not 
unreasonably maintain that, in speaking of the relation of the self 
to its ideas, he uses the words in and on in a loose sense, and does 
not intend them to be taken with offensive literalness. We all 
say in common life that ideas are in the mind, and we do not stop 
to make clear to ourselves what our words mean. But philosophic 
theory — and the doctrine of the atomic self is a philosophic theory 
— has no right to be content with the indefiniteness of thought 
which may serve a useful purpose in common life. When Berkeley 
has set forth his doctrine that the things of sense are only ideas, 
and are, hence, in the mind, he comes face to face with the objec- 
tion that, if they are extended and yet are in the mind, the mind 
must be extended. This consequence he is not ready to admit, 
and he argues that the mind is not extended, for these things 
are in the mind only "by way of idea."^ What can this mean? 
Nothing definite. He has fled to the refuge of the plain man — 
obscurity. Ideas are in the mind somehow, but just how cannot 
be made plain. 

In the foregoing pages I have tried to make it clear that, when 
the indefinite thought of the plain man is carefully examined, it is 
found to be the echo of an ancient materialism or semi-materialism. 
This gives it its positive content. With this it attempts to com- 
bine the statement that the self is immaterial. When great em- 
phasis is laid upon this latter, the positive content of the atomic 
doctrine is wiped out of existence. But in most men's minds 
great emphasis is not laid upon this negative element, and they 
can find satisfaction in the indefinite materialistic notions which 
they continue to hold touching the substance of the self, its rela- 
tion to its ideas, its presence in the human body, and its interaction 
with matter. 

It may appear to some that I am beating a dead horse in thus 
criticising at length the doctrine of the atomic self. It is held in 
certain quarters that the notion of substratum has been so thor- 
oughl}^ exploded that it is scarcely necessary to waste time over it. 
Whatever the self may be, it is said, we can at least be sure that 
1 *' Principles of Human Knowledge," § 49. 



280 Mind and Matter 

it is not the Lockian substance^ for it is mere misconception to 
assume that things have an indefinite and unintelligible core of 
this kind. 

But it is by no means evident that the doctrine is so dead as 
those who speak thus would have us believe. No doctrine can 
hold its own for centuries as the orthodox belief of the scholarly 
world, without leaving its trace upon the thought even of an age 
more or less influenced by new ideas. The doctrine of the atomic 
self is emphatically that of the plain man to-day, i.e. it embodies 
the notions cherished by vastly the greater part of the cultivated 
persons whom one meets, touching the nature of the mind and its 
connection with the body. Until quite recently it was about the 
only doctrine taught to the youth in the higher institutions of 
learning in England and America, and it is still presented as the 
final word of wisdom in many quarters where one might have 
expected to find something better. 

Nor must it be overlooked — and this is a point of especial 
importance — that some of those who appear to be the most ener- 
getic in their repudiation of the atomic self do not really repudiate 
it at all. They refine it away, they sublimate it, they deny to it a 
place in time as well as a position in space, they render it the most 
incomprehensible of all incomprehensibles, they call it a self-activ- 
ity — and, in the face of all this, they go on thinking of it indefi- 
nitely in much the same way as the plain man thinks of his atomic 
self. The dust of words which they have raised makes it more or 
less difficult to distinguish what is the true content of their doc- 
trine. Nevertheless, a careful examination cannot fail to reveal 
that they are true descendants of the substratumists, and that, if 
their balloon has taken an all too erratic flight into the region of 
thin air, it is only because they have been more incautious than the 
genuine substratumist in throwing out the materialistic ballast 
that keeps the doctrine of the atomic self from resolving itself into 
mere negations. Of this neo-Kantian branch of the substratumists 
I have treated elsewhere,^ and it is unnecessary for me to enter 
into the matter here at greater length. 

But what shall we say to one who drops the substratum self 
altogether and assigns to ideas the r81e which has heretofore been 
assigned to it — who makes ideas determinative of motions in 
matter? This can hardly be said to be a doctrine affected by the 

1 Chapter V. 



The Atomic Self 281 

plain man, for he must have, as we have seen, a something in which 
ideas may inhere or to which they may in some sense belong. 
Still, it is a possible doctrine, and it may not without justice be re- 
garded as a development from or a modification of the plain man's 
doctrine. That they have much in common becomes evident just 
as soon as we endeavor to make quite clear what is meant by the 
statement that ideas are determinative of motions in matter. 

We are to conceive that a detailed knowledge of all the motions 
of all the atoms constituting the body of the boy who is chasing 
the dog would reveal that we are not dealing with a perfect 
mechanism. At some point there is a break. All the motions 
which have preceded will not account for all the motions that 
follow. We must fill up this gap with ideas and suppose them to 
be capable of being affected by the machine and, in turn, of affect- 
ing it. In other words, the ideas become, at least for the time 
being, a part of the machine. 

Now, that ideas should become even for an instant a part of the 
machine can seem, simple and natural only to one who has no clear 
conception of all that this implies. If the statement that matter 
can act upon ideas and ideas upon matter is to mean anything at 
all, and is not to remain an empty collocation of sounds, we must 
conceive the ideas to be present in the body. The machine needs 
patching up at the break, and the insertion of a coupling which is 
not present is manifest nonsense. If the ideas are not entities 
which exist in space, if they are nowhere, then they are, of course, 
no nearer to the point at which they are needed than they are to 
any other point in the body. Indeed, they are no nearer to this 
point than they are to any point in any other body, and the notion 
of the insertion of ideas to fill a gap simply lapses. 

Descartes realized this truth perfectly well, and he took care to 
put his soul in the little pineal gland, where it could do the most 
good. If we deny that the things which interact are present to 
each other, if we deny that they form part of the same system in 
space, we exenterate our notion of interaction, and it becomes a 
mere shell. As a matter of fact, we do not have to go far afield to 
discover that those who trace the series of changes which run from 
the periphery of the body along the afferent nerves, and the series 
of changes which run from the central nervous system along the 
efferent nerves, and find it impossible to connect these with 
each other except with a coupling of ideas — we do not, I say, 



282 Mind and Matter 

have to go far to find that these vaguely assign to ideas a spatial 
presence, and put them between the two sets of changes. They do 
precisely what the plain man does with his atomic self, and they do 
it, just as he does, without a clear recognition of what it is that 
they are doing. ^ 

If, then, the ideas are to be built into the machine in even a 
semi-intelligible sense, they must be conceived to be present in 
the body. We have seen above that, when we strive to get a 
clear understanding of the nature of the presence of the atomic 
self in the body, we discover it to be a dimly imagined material 
presence. Here the case is the same. But this vague attribu- 
tion to ideas of a material presence must go the way of all mis- 
conceptions when its true significance is brought to light. 

Let us suppose that the idea thus made determinative of motions 
in matter is that of a yellow dog. Shall we place this at a definite 
point in the mist of moving atoms that constitute the boy's brain? 
Can atoms move toward it and away from it? Can they touch it? 
Can it move from place to place ? Is it spread out in space as it 
seems to the boy to be, or must we assume it to be a mathematical 

1 " If feelings are causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and check- 
ings of internal cerebral motions, of which in themselves we are entirely without 
knowledge. It is probable that for years to come we shall have to infer what 
happens in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects which we observe. 
The organ will be for us a sort of vat in which feelings and motions somehow go on 
stewing together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we catch but 
the statistical result. Why under these circumstances we should be asked to 
forswear the language of our childhood I cannot well imagine, especially as it is 
perfectly compatible with the language of physiology. The feelings can produce 
nothing absolutely new, they can only reinforce and inhibit reflex currents, and 
the original organization by physiological forces of these in patlis must always be 
the groundwork of the psychological scheme. 

"... The nerve-currents, coursing through the cells and fibres, must in this 
case be supposed strengthened by the fact of their awaking one consciousness and 
dampened by awaking another. How such reaction of the consciousness upon the 
currents may occur must remain at present unsolved. 

"... Habitual actions are certain, and being in no danger of going astray 
from their end need no extraneous help. In hesitant action there seem many alter- 
native possibilities of final nervous discharge. The feeling awakened by the nascent 
excitement of each alternative nerve-tract seems by its attractive or repulsive 
quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete. 
Wliere indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonizingly 
intense. Feeling, from this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of the 
chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already laid down, and groping 
among the fresh ends presented to it for the one which seems best to tit the case." 
— James, "Psychology," Chapter V. 



The Atomic Self 283 

point ? If it cannot lie between two atoms, approach and be 
approached, touch and be touched, in what sense can it be declared 
to be present? He who talks vaguely of its presence, and does 
not raise any of these questions, is walking in thick darkness and 
is unaware of that fact. He dimly conceives ideas to be material, 
just as the plain man dimly conceives of the atomic self as mate- 
rial. He puts them in space, and yet he would shrink from the 
consequences that this entails, did he realize what those conse- 
quences are. 

This doctrine that ideas may be used to patch up a defective 
mechanism does not need to be discussed at great length, because 
it differs so little, in any point that need concern us here, from the 
doctrine of the atomic self. One is impressed, in studying both 
the original doctrine and its modification, with the thought that it 
is exceedingly hard for the human mind to shake itself free from 
materialistic ways of thinking. Some of those who have been 
most anxious not to be accounted materialists have retained the 
most unmistakable traces of materialistic thought. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE AUTOMATON THEORY : ITS GENESIS 

Thus it seems clear that what is known as the "interaction" 
theory of the relation of mind and body gains what plausibility it 
possesses from the covert ascription of materiality to mind. When 
this is made apparent, and when a resolute attempt is made to 
remove every materialistic element from the notion of the mind, 
then it also becomes clear that the attempt to build mind into the 
bodily mechanism, and to make it, at least for the time being, one 
of its constituent parts, is nothing less than absurd. The mind is 
not present to the body in any sense that would permit of its fill- 
ing a gap in the bodily mechanism. Interaction becomes a mere 
word, the name of an empty nothing, and the impulse to insist 
upon it dies of inanition. No clear-minded man can take pleasure 
in maintaining that there is interaction between mind and body, 
if the word "interaction" suggests to his mind nothing at all. 

But if we dismiss the doctrine of interaction as being rank 
materialism in disguise, and hence worthy of reprobation, what 
remains to us? There remains, for one thing, the doctrine of tlie 
physical automaton with parallel mental states, and this has been 
the refuge of many who have felt themselves forced out of the 
position occupied by the interactionist. What can be said for and 
against this doctrine ? 

That the human mind is related to the human body as it is 
not related to other material things was discovered by man long 
before there was a science of psychology. But the problem of the 
mind's more definite localization — to use a materialistic form of 
expression somewhat justified by custom — was and had to remain 
an insoluble problem until men gained some definite knowledge 
of the structure of the human body and of the mode of function- 
ing of its various parts. Thus, at the time of their promulgation, 
no authoritative denial could be given to the Atomistic doctrine 
that the brain is the seat of thought, the heart of anger, and the 

284 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 285 

liver of desire ; to the doctrine of Critias, who regarded the blood 
as the seat and substratum of the soul ; to that of Plato, who dis- 
tributed his tripartite soul in the head, the chest, and the region 
below the diaphragm ; or to that of Aristotle, who relegated the 
brain to a subordinate place in the animal economy and found the 
heart to be the seat of sensations. 

Not until the beginnings of modern philosophy and that re- 
vival of the study of nature which has resulted in the several 
sciences as we now have them, did man come into the possession 
of such information as would justify him in definitely and finally 
rejecting the one or the other of the above-mentioned doctrines, and 
in expecting all those who follow his arguments to be compelled 
by their cogency to accept his conclusions. In place of conflicting 
opinions, more or less arbitrarily taken up upon a basis of slender 
and uncertain evidence, there has emerged a body of facts that it 
is not too much to call scientific, and that we find presented in 
substantially the same form by all reputable writers upon physiol- 
ogy and physiological psychology. It remains to render our 
knowledge upon the subject more complete and definite, and it 
also remains to interpret its significance, but it seems to be no 
longer an open question whether the whole edifice which has 
been built up by successive generations of investigators shall 
be allowed to stand, or shall be torn down in order to make 
room for a quite different structure. One may hold tenta- 
tively some of the conclusions arrived at by Goltz, or Munk, 
or Ferrier, or Luciani, and may be strongly inclined to wait for 
more light before turning them into articles of faith ; but no 
reasonable man can in our day revert to the doctrine of Aristotle, 
or cast in his lot with the Atomists. 

The honor of having laid enduring foundations for this edifice 
must be accorded to Descartes, whose careful study of the struc- 
ture of the human body revealed to his discriminating eye that 
it is a mechanism of vast complexity and of the most perfect 
adjustment. In particular he comprehended the significance of 
the brain as a central organ and the meaning of the distribution 
of the nerves which connect it with every part of the body. He 
writes : — 

" We must know, therefore, that the human soul, although it 
is united with the whole body, has, nevertheless, its chief seat 
in the brain, in which alone it not only understands and imagines, 



286 Mind and Matter 

but also feels ; and this by means of the nerves which, like 
threads, extend from the brain to all the other members, and 
which are so connected with them, that it is scarcely possible 
to touch any part of the human body without setting in motion 
some nerve-endings scattered through it, with the result that 
their motion is transferred to the other extremities of these 
nerves, which are collected together in the brain around the 
seat of the soul, as I have explained at sufficient length in the 
fourth chapter of my Dioptrics. Now the motions thus excited 
in the brain by the nerves affect in divers ways the soul or mind 
intimately united with the brain, according to their divers natures. 
And these various affections of the mind, or the thought im- 
mediately resulting from these motions, are called sense-percep- 
tions, or, in common parlance, sensations."^ 

" It is clearly proved that the soul perceives what happens to 
the body in each of the members, not in so far as it is in each of 
the raembei-s, but only in so far as it is in the brain, and by means 
of the nerves. For, in the first place, various maladies which 
affect the brain alone deprive us of all sensation or disorder sen- 
sation ; just as sleep, which is only in the brain, daily deprives us 
in great part of our power of perception, which is afterwards re- 
stored when we wake. In the second place, though the brain 
be uninjured, if only the nervous paths extending to it from the 
external members be obstructed, the perception of those members is 
lost. Finally, pain is sometimes felt as though it were in certain 
members in which there is no cause of pain, while there is such 
cause in certain others through which pass the nerves extending 
from the former to the brain. This last fact may be illustrated by 
numberless experiments, but here it is sufficient to cite one. A 
certain maiden whose hand was badly diseased was blindfolded 
whenever the surgeon came, that she might not be distressed by 
the sight of the dressing of the sore. After some days her arm 
was amputated as far up as the elbow, because gangrene had 
spread in it, and cloths were put in place of the arm, so as 
to keep her in complete ignorance of the fact that she was de- 
prived of it. Nevertheless, she kept complaining that she felt 
various pains, now in one, now in another, of the fingers of the 
hand that had been cut off. It is plain that this could not have 
happened, were it not that the nerves, which formerly ran from 

1 "PrincipiaPhilosophiae," IV, 189. 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 287 

the brain to the hand, and which after the operation terminated 
in the arm at the elbow, were there set in motion in the same 
manner as they formerly had to be set in motion in the hand in 
order to impress upon the soul residing in the brain the perception 
of an ache in this or that finger." ^ 

The brain, then, is, in an especial sense, the organ of conscious- 
ness. Messages are brought to it from the various members, and, 
when it is affected in certain ways, the soul has perceptions. Nor 
is it necessary to suppose that, when an object is perceived, there 
is an image of the object formed in the brain, and that this is con- 
templated by the soul. The motion in the brain is quite different 
from the perception of the object.^ And just as a message 
brought along a nerve to the brain is the necessary antecedent 
of sensation or perception, so a message sent from the brain along 
a nerve is the necessary antecedent of every movement in the 
muscles.^ Some of the movements in the muscles are initiated 
by the soul, which inclines the little pineal gland in the brain 
in this direction or in that, and thus sends out the appropriate 
message to the muscles,* but many movements may take place 
which are not thus initiated : — 

" I have explained in my Dioptrics how all visual objects are 
revealed to us only because they set up a local disturbance, by 
means of the transparent bodies which are between them and us, 
first in the little threads of the optic nerves which are at the 
back of the eyes, and after that in the parts of the brain whence 
these nerves come ; and they set these in motion in as many dif- 
ferent ways as they cause us to see differences in the objects. I 
have also explained that it is not the very movements which 
take place in the eye, but those which take place in the brain, 
that represent these objects to the soul. In the same way it is 
easy to conceive that sounds, odors, tastes, heat, pain, hunger, 
thirst, and in general all the objects, whether of our other ex- 
ternal senses or of our internal appetites, also excite some move- 
ment in our nerves, which passes along them to the brain. And 
these divers movements of the brain, besides causing our soul 
to perceive divers feelings, can also bring it about without the 
intervention of the soul that the spirits take their course toward 
certain muscles rather than toward others, and thus move our 

1 "Principia PhilosopMsB," IV, 196. 2 " Dioptrique," Discours Quatrifeme. 

3 " Les Passions de rAme," Art. 11. * Ibid., Art. 24. 



288 Mind and Matter 

members. In proof of this, I cite one example. If some one 
brings his hand quickly toward our eyes, as though with the in- 
tention of striking us, we, although we know him to be our friend 
and to be doing it merely by way of jest, and are sure that he will 
take care to do us no harm, nevertheless find it difficult to 
avoid closing our eyes. This shows that the action takes place 
without the intervention of the soul, for it is against our will, 
which is the only or, at least, the principal action of the soul. 
It is due to the fact that the mechanism of our body is such that 
the movement of the hand toward our eyes excites another move- 
ment in our brain, and this conducts the animal spirits into the 
muscles which make the eyelids fall." ^ 

Such movements are performed by the body automatically, and 
they are sufiQciently numerous. Breathing, walking, eating, and, 
indeed, all the movements which we have in common with the 
brutes may be thus automatic. They are due to the mechanism 
of the body, just as the movement of a watch is due to its spring 
and to the shape of its w^heels.^ And since such movements do 
not require the intervention of the soul, it is unnecessary to assume 
that creatures capable of such movements alone have conscious- 
ness of any sort — they are bare machines, and are incapable of 
thought and feeling. It is a mere prejudice that leads us to 
attribute consciousness to the brutes. 

There are, however, certain actions that cannot be performed by 
the body automatically. These are initiated by the soul resident 
in the little pineal gland, w^hich directs the flow of the animal 
spirits, and possesses control over the mechanism of the body. The 
soul must obtain its information from the messages brought to it 
along the nerves, and even its power to recollect past experiences 
is due to traces left by past movements of the spirits in the brain ; * 
in so far it is dependent upon the mechanism of the body. But it 
may modify the movements which would take place in the body 
if left to itself, and a human body joined to a human soul cannot 
be regarded as a mere machine. It is a machine with an intelli- 
gent governor. 

We have seen* that the Cartesian soul, seated at a definite 
point in the brain, and engaged in pushing and being pushed, 
comes perilously near to being a mere lump of matter, a part of 

1 " Les Passions de TAme," Art. 13. «7?>iU, Art. 16. 

* Ibid., Art. 42. * See the preceding chapter. 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 289 

the machine that it is supposed to control. Yet Descartes had 
maintained that the essence of matter is extension and the essence 
of the soul is thought. He had by his definitions so separated the 
two that it became inconceivable that they should come together 
in such a way as to form one whole. The difficulty so impressed his 
successors that they were impelled to deny the direct interaction 
of soul and body. How can that which is not body either push 
or be pushed ? It remained to account for the apparent interaction 
of soul and body in some other way, and several ways were sug- 
gested. 

The Occasionalist maintained that, no direct interaction being 
possible, on occasion of this or that volition God calls forth the 
appropriate motion in matter; and in adopting this doctrine he 
took refuge in what Spinoza calls " the asylum of ignorance." 
The advocate of Predetermined Harmony held that mind and body 
are related as are two clocks, whose wheels revolve independently, 
but which have been so adjusted that their motions exactly 
correspond. 

Both of these suggestions were of the sort that might be 
expected to appeal more forcibly to the mediaeval mind than to 
the modern mind ; but the same cannot be said of the solution of 
the problem propounded by Spinoza, that strange genius who found 
it possible to combine a mediaeval metaphysic with a clear appre- 
ciation of the significance of the new mechanical philosophy. He 
thinks that we may comprehend clearly how it is that the body 
cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind determine the 
body to motion and rest, if we will but consider that the mind and 
the body are one and the same thing viewed under two attributes, 
i.e. viewed, in the one case, under the attribute thought, and, in 
the other, under the attribute extension. Body may determine 
changes in body, and thought may determine changes in thought, 
but a thing cannot determine itself, and mind and body are one and 
the same thing. There is not interaction, but there is parallelism, 
and " the order of the things done and suffered by our body is by 
nature the same as the order of the actions and passions of the 
mind." 1 

" These arguments," he continues, " leave no room for doubt, 
but nevertheless I scarcely think I can induce men to weigh them 
with an unprejudiced mind, unless I support the doctrine by an 
1 " Ethics," III, 2, scholium. 



290 Mind and Matter 

appeal to experience, so firmly are men persuaded that the body is 
set in motion and is brought to rest solely at the mind's good pleas- 
ure, and performs a multitude of actions which depend only on 
the mind's choice and ability to think. For as yet no one has 
determined of what the body is capable ; in other words, experience 
has as yet taught no one what the body can do according to the 
laws of nature, considered merely as corporeal nature, and what it 
cannot do unless it be determined by the mind. For no one has 
as yet a sufficiently accurate knowledge of the structure of the body 
to be able to explain all its functions ; to say nothing of the fact 
that we observe in brutes many actions that far surpass human 
sagacity, and that somnambulists do a great many things while 
asleep that they would not dare to do when awake ; which suffi- 
ciently proves that the body, in accordance with the laws of its 
own nature solely, can do much that its mind wonders at. 

" Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves 
the body, nor how many degrees of motion it can impart to the 
body, and how swiftly it can move it. Hence it follows that when 
men say that this or that action of the body has its source in the 
mind, which controls the body, they do not know what they are 
saying, and merely confess in high-sounding words that they are 
ignorant of the true cause of that action and do not wonder at it. 

" They will object that, whether they do or do not know by 
what means the mind moves the body, yet they know by experi- 
ence that if the human mind were not capable of thinking, the 
body would be motionless. Furthermore, that they know by ex- 
perience that it is within the power of the mind alone to speak 
or to remain silent, and to do many other things which, conse- 
quently, they believe to depend upon the mind's decree. 

" But, as regards the first point, I ask those who urge this 
objection, whether experience does not also show that if the body 
remains motionless, the mind is incapable of thinking ? For when 
the body comes to rest in sleep, the mind slumbers with it, and has 
not the power of thinking it has when awake. Again, I think 
every one knows by experience that the mind is not always equally 
capable of thinking about the same object ; but, according as the 
body is the better adapted to having the image of this or that 
object excited in it, the mind is the more capable of contemplat- 
ing this or that object. It will be objected that one cannot, from 
tlie laws of nature, when nature is regarded merely as corporeal, 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 291 

deduce the causes of buildings, paintings, and things of this sort, 
which are due solely to human skill, nor could the human body, 
unless it were determined and guided by the mind, build a temple. 
But I have already shown that those who reason thus do not 
know what the body can do, or what can be deduced from a mere 
contemplation of its nature, and that they do know by experience 
that a great many things take place merely according to the laws 
of nature that they never would have believed could take place 
except under the direction of the mind. Such are the acts per- 
formed by somnambulists during sleep — acts which they them- 
selves wonder at when awake. I would, moreover, call attention 
to the structure of the human body, which vastly surpasses in 
ingenuity anything constructed by human skill, to say nothing of 
the truth, proved above, that an infinity of things must follow 
from nature considered under any attribute whatever. 

"x\nd as regards the second point, surely the condition of 
human affairs would be much more satisfactory if it were as much 
within man's power to be silent as to speak. But experience 
gives sufficient and more than sufficient proof of the fact that 
there is nothing less under a man's control than his tongue, nor is 
there anything of which a man is less capable than of restraining 
his impulses. This is the reason that most persons believe that 
we are free only in doing those things to which we are impelled 
by slight desires, for the impulse to do such things can be easily 
checked by the memory of some other thing of which we often 
think; but that we are by no means free in doing those things to 
which we are impelled by strong emotion, which cannot be checked 
by the memory of some other thing. But had they not had expe- 
rience of the fact that we do many things which we afterward 
regret, and that we often, when we are harassed by conflicting 
emotions, see the better and follow the worse, nothing would pre- 
vent them from believing that we are always free in our actions. 
Thus the infant believes that it desires milk of its own free will ; 
the angry child that it is free in seeking revenge ; and the timid 
that it is free in taking to flight. Again, a drunken man believes 
that he says of his own free will things he afterward, when sober, 
wishes he had left unsaid ; so also an insane man, a garrulous 
■woman, a child, and very many others of the sort believe they 
speak of their own free will, while, nevertheless, they are unable 
to control their impulse to talk. Thus experience itself shows, 



292 Mind and Matter 

no less clearly than reason, that men think themselves free only 
because they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the 
causes which determine them. It shows, moreover, that the mind's 
decisions are nothing but its impulses, which vary with the vary- 
ing condition of the body. For every one regulates his actions as 
his emotions dictate ; and those who are harassed by conflicting 
emotions do not know what they want; while those who are not 
controlled by any emotion are driven hither and thither by the 
slightest motive. All this certainly shows clearly that the mind's 
decision, as well as its impulse and the determining of the body, 
all are by nature simultaneous, or rather all are one and the same 
thing, which, when it is considered under and expressed by the 
attribute thought, we call a decision, and when it is considered 
under the attribute extension, and deduced from the laws of motion 
and rest, we call a determining." 

The reader will see that, in passing from Descartes to Spinoza 
we make a long step in advance. By an ingenious suggestion, a 
place among existing things seems to be found for the human 
mind without turning it into a quasi-material something and inter- 
jecting it as a stop-gap between two motions in matter. Why the 
course of ideas should run parallel with the series of changes 
which take place in the body seems, at first blush, at least, to be 
explained by the fact that the ideas are but another side, so to 
speak, of such changes. 

And to one who has taken this step it is quite possible to 
accept all that Descartes says of the mechanism of the body and 
yet repudiate the Cartesian doctrine, shocking to the mind of the 
natural man, that the brutes are mere machines without conscious- 
ness. No man whose mind has not been perverted by philosophic 
theory can believe that his dog does not think and feel, if only in 
a humble way. If all the changes in the human body can be 
explained by a reference to matter in motion alone, and, neverthe- 
less, a man can be conscious, it follows that automatism does not 
necessarily imply unconsciousness. Of course, the distribution of 
minds in nature remains a question to be investigated, and one 
may well ask oneself where one may infer mind and where one 
may not. Spinoza himself regarded all nature as animated,^ and 
we may or may not elect to follow him in this, even if we accept 
his doctrine of parallelism in a general way. 
1 "Ethics," II, 13, scholium. 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 293 

The problem of the distribution of minds, and that of the free- 
dom of the will touched upon in the above extract, will be dis- 
cussed in later chapters. It is enough here to recognize that a 
place seems to have been made for mind which is not a place in an 
offensive sense of the word, — a place which can be occupied only 
by a material thing, — and also that a peculiar and intimate rela- 
tion has been established between the human mind and the human 
body. One must add, however, as touching this last point, that 
Spinoza, although he was quite familiar with the results of Des- 
cartes' investigations, nevertheless uniformly dwells upon the rela- 
tion of mind and hody^ and not upon the relation of mind and 
brain} The beginnings of the science of cerebral physiology do 
not appear to have impressed him greatly, apparently because of 
his doctrine of the universal distribution of mind — not the first 
instance in which a prepossession in favor of some philosophical 
theory has blinded one to the significance of scientific discoveries. 

I have set forth at some length the argument of Descartes and 
the solution offered by Spinoza of the problem he raises, because 
the two appear in combination in the modern doctrine of the physi- 
cal automaton with parallel mental states, and because one can 
scarcely do full justice to both aspects of that doctrine until one 
knows how they came to take their place in the evolution of specu- 
lative thought. 

Some things to which Descartes pinned his faith have disap- 
peared from modern physiological theory. The animal spirits, 
which ran along the nerves from the periphery of the body to 
the brain, and from the brain to the muscles, have been deprived 
of their r61e. The pineal gland has lost its preeminent distinction 
as the soul's seat, and has sunk into an insignificance little better 
than that of a pimple. The cerebral cortex has assumed a new 
importance, and certain parts of it have been found to be more 
intimately concerned in certain sensory and motor functions than 
other parts. An array of facts has been marshalled, pathological 
and experimental, which has made the whole subject of the locali- 
zation of consciousness (may I be permitted the phrase?) more 
bewildering than it seemed to be at an earlier age, when the only 
mystery which remained to be fathomed appeared to be that of the 
interaction of the soul with " the little gland in the midst of the 
brain." The study of the hypnotic and other allied states has 

1 "Ethics," II, passm. 



294 Mind and Matter 

resulted in the emergence of the problem of conceiving of two or 
more mutually exclusive consciousnesses as connected with the 
one brain. Finally, the decapitated frog, with its seemingly pur- 
posive actions, and experiments performed upon other mutilated 
animals, as well as certain pathological phenomena observed in 
human beings, have suggested that, although the consciousness of 
consciousnesses, that one which we commonly have in mind when 
we speak of the consciousness of this or that animal, is to be 
referred to the cerebral cortex, yet there may be other conscious- 
nesses of a more or less rudimentary sort connected with lower 
nervous centres in the same animal. The whole subject has 
become vastly more complex than it was when Descartes wrote, 
and yet, barring the jump at a given point from brain to mind and 
from mind to brain, the modern doctrine differs only in detail from 
the Cartesian. The science of cerebral physiology has advanced, 
but it still rests upon the basis laid down for it by Descartes. 

Of some of these differences in detail it will be necessary 
to speak when I come to discuss the question of the distribution 
of minds in nature. Meanwhile, it is well to notice that not all 
of those who have followed the advance of science have clearly 
appreciated the significance of the Spinozistic suggestion of the 
parallelism of mind and body. They remain semi-Cartesian in 
their view of the relation of mind and body. 

This is evidently true of those somewhat unreflective material- 
ists who speak of consciousness as a " secretion " or as a " function " 
of the brain. For them the soul has been ejected from its place in 
the pineal gland, but it still holds a place in the world of matter 
and motion under an assumed name. And the same may be said 
of some who are not willing to call themselves materialists, and 
yet slip unconsciously into a similar error. Of these I cannot cite 
a better example than Professor Huxley, who has made a careful 
study of the Cartesian doctrine, and shows himself to be in much 
sympathy with it. He writes ; — 

" But though we may see reason to disagree with Descartes' 
hypothesis that brutes are unconscious machines, it does not follow 
that he was wrong in regarding them as automata ; and the view 
that they are such conscious machines is that which is implicitly, 
or explicitly, adopted by most persons. When we speak of the 
actions of the lower animals being guided by instinct and not by 
reason, what we really mean is that, though they feel as we do, 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 295 

yet their actions are the results of their physical organization. We 
believe, in short, that they are machines, one part of which (the 
nervous system) not only sets the rest in motion, and coordinates 
its movements in relation v^ith changes in surrounding bodies, but 
is provided vi^ith special apparatus, the function of which is the 
calling into existence of those states of consciousness which are 
termed sensations, emotions, and ideas. I believe that this gen- 
erally accepted view is the best expression of the facts at present 
known. 

" It is experimentally demonstrable — any one who cares to run 
a pin into himself may perform a sufficient demonstration of the 
fact — that a mode of motion of the nervous system is the immedi- 
ate antecedent of a state of consciousness. All but the adherents 
of ' Occasionalism,' or of the doctrine of ' Preestablished Har- 
mony ' (if any such now exist), must admit that we have as much 
reason for regarding the mode of motion of the nervous system as 
the cause of the state of consciousness, as we have for regarding 
any event as the cause of another. How the one phenomenon 
causes the other we know, as much or as little, as in any other case 
of causation ; but we have as much right to believe that the sensa- 
tion is an effect of the molecular change as we have to believe 
that motion is an effect of impact ; and there is as much propriety 
in saying that the brain evolves sensation as there is in saying 
that an iron rod, when hammered, evolves heat. 

" As I have endeavored to show, we are justified in supposing 
that something analogous to what happens in ourselves takes place 
in the brutes, and that the affections of their sensory nerves give 
rise to molecular changes in the brain, which again give rise to or 
evolve the corresponding states of consciousness. Nor can there 
be any reasonable doubt that the emotions of brutes, and such 
ideas as they possess, are similarly dependent upon molecular 
brain changes. Each sensory impression leaves behind a record 
in the structure of the brain — an ' ideagenous ' molecule, so to 
speak, which is competent, under certain conditions, to reproduce, 
in a fainter condition, the state of consciousness which corresponds 
with that sensory impression ; and it is these * ideagenous mole- 
cules ' which are the physical basis of memory. 

" It may be assumed, then, that molecular changes in the brain 
are the causes of all the states of consciousness of brutes. Is there 
any evidence that these states of consciousness may, conversely, 



296 Mhid mid Matter 

cause those molecular changes which give rise to muscular motion ? 
I see no such evidence. The frog walks, hops, swims, and goes 
through his gymnastic performances quite as well without con- 
sciousness, and consequently without volition, as with it ; and if a 
frog, in his natural state, possesses anything corresponding with 
what we call volition, there is no reason to think tliat it is any- 
thino- but a concomitant of the molecular chancres in the brain 

o o 

which form part of the series involved in the production of motion. 

" The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the 
mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its work- 
ing, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that 
working as the steam whistle, which accompanies the work of a 
locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their 
volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical 
changes, not a cause of such changes. 

"... It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the 
argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men ; 
and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are 
immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance. 
It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that any 
state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the 
matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it fol- 
lows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in con- 
sciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the 
organism ; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling 
we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol 
of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. 
AVe are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only 
intelligible sense of that much-abused term, — inasmuch as in many 
respects we are able to do as we like, — but none the less parts of 
the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, 
composes that which is, and has been, and shall be — the sum of 
existence."^ 

It is quite clear that the man who believes the human body or 
the body of the brute to be '' provided with special apparatus, the 
function of which is the calling into existence of those states of 
consciousness which are termed sensations, emotions, and ideas," 
and, furthermore, who regards such states of consciousness as 

1 On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History, "Collected 
Essays," N.Y., 1002, Vol. I, pp. 237-244. 



1 



The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 297 

" collateral products " of the body's working, makes the relation 
of mind and brain much the same S,s that of the saliva and the 
salivary gland. He is no true parallelist, and he cannot escape 
the just criticism which may be brought against the materialist. 
He may differ from the interactionist in refusing to regard con- 
sciousness as a cause of bodily motions ; but he makes it an effect 
of physical changes, and thus assigns to it a place in the chain of 
causes and effects which make up the life history of the physical 
universe. 

The secretion of a gland, however, is not and cannot be a mere 
effect. When once produced, it does not simply disappear from 
the universe into which it has been ushered, and leave no trace 
behind. And if consciousness has such a place in the material 
world, it ought to be possible, with the growth of science, to lay 
it bare to direct inspection, to capture it or the products of its 
decomposition, and investigate such, as one might investigate the 
structure of a molecule. Practical difficulties there may be in 
such an investigation ; but theoretical difficulties there surely can- 
not be. Are we not dealing with a material product? and are not 
all material products open to direct inspection, except when they 
are hidden from our eyes by reason of their excessive minuteness, 
or by some barrier of the sort, which it is not absurd to dream of 
as becoming some day no longer a barrier? The true parallelist 
strongly objects to any doctrine which thus obliterates, even 
covertly, the distinction between mind and matter. To his 
doctrine, in its modern form, we will now turn. It is suffi- 
ciently important to be treated in separate chapters. 



CHAPTER XIX 
THE AUTOMATON THEORY: PARALLELISM 

In describing the modern doctrine of the physical automaton 
with parallel psychical states, I cannot do better than to follow 
tliat clearest of writers, Professor W. K. Clifford, who has set it 
forth in detail in his lecture on " Body and Mind." ^ 

Professor Clifford points out that there are sciences which have 
to do with material things, inorganic and organic, and he thinks 
that, the gulf between inorganic or organic bodies having at last 
been firmly bridged over, we may regard ourselves as having now 
one united science of physics, which has to do with matter in all 
its forms. With this science he contrasts the science of conscious- 
ness, which deals with the laws of mind, and he asks whether it is 
not possible to construct some bridge that will firmly unite the two. 

That this bridge may not break down like those which philoso- 
phers have made, he thinks that it is necessary to observe with great 
care the exact difference between the two classes of facts, material 
and mental. "If we confuse the two things together to begin 
with," he writes, "if we do not recognize the great difference 
between them, we shall not be likely to find any explanation 
which will reduce them to some common term. The first thing, 
therefore, that we have to do is to realize as clearly as possible 
how profound the gulf is between the facts which we call Physi- 
cal facts and the facts which we call Mental facts." Tlie distinc- 
tion has been one which has been observed from the earliest times, 
for even primitive man has ascribed to other men a consciousness 
like his own. But primitive man has connected this consciousness 
with the body seen in dreams, a body not physical in the ordinary 
sense, and not made of ordinary matter. Such a body he has called 
the soul. It is difficult to think that the gross material body can 
be conscious, but when one has come to believe that we possess 
another and a different body, of the nature of which we know 

1 "Lectures and Essays," London, 1879, Vol. H. 
298 



The Automaton Theory: Parallelism 299 

little, it is natural to make it responsible for the consciousness 
which we cannot help attributing to other men. Thus the soul 
which primitive man, and those who have followed him, have 
attributed to each man, is, after all, a material thing in disguise. 
What can science put in place of this early hypothesis of our 
savage ancestors? 

In developing his thought Clifford recognizes Descartes as the 
great discoverer of the truth that the nervous system is that part 
of the body which is related directly to the mind, and he quotes 
approvingly the series of propositions in which Professor Huxlej^ 
sums up Descartes' contribution to the doctrine of mind and brain, 
expounding them in the light of modern thought. As far as Des- 
cartes' argument goes, he is in substantial agreement with it : the 
brain is the organ of sensation, thought, and emotion ; the move- 
ments of animals are due to a change in the form of the muscles, 
and this is brought about by a message from the brain carried along 
a motor nerve ; the sensations of animals are due to messages brought 
along sensory nerves to the brain ; messages may be transmitted 
from the sensory nerves, through the brain, to the motor nerves, 
and thus cause movement of muscle, without, or even contrary to, 
volition; the motion of any portion of the brain, excited by the 
motion of a sensory nerve, leaves behind it a readiness to be 
moved in the same way in that part, and anything which resusci- 
tates the motion gives rise to the appropriate feeling, which is 
the physical mechanism of memory. In all this it is only neces- 
sary to change a word here and there ; but to this something 
should be added. It is this: — 

We must not fail to note that, not only is some change in the 
matter of the brain the invariable antecedent, but some other change 
is the invariable concomitant of sensation, thought, and emotion. 
Furthermore, not only does the motion of any portion of the brain, 
excited by the motion of a sensory nerve, leave behind it a readi- 
ness to be moved in the same way in that part, but two simul- 
taneous disturbances set up in the brain create, in some way or 
other, a link between them, so that, when one of these disturb- 
ances is set up afterward, the other one is also set up. 

Again. It should be remarked that there are two ways in 
which a stimulus coming, let us say, to the eye can be made to 
move the hand. In the following diagram let E be the eye, 
R and B the two masses of gray matter Ij^ing at the base of 



300 Mind and Matter 

the brain and called, respectively, the optic thalami and the cor- 
pora striata^ H the hand, and CO the cerebral hemispheres. It 
is possible for the light impinging upon the eye to send a mes- 
sage along the optic nerve to the optic thalami, and that message 
may go almost direct to the hand, so as to make the hand move ; 
or else the message may go by a longer route, which takes more 
time. If an action takes place involuntarily, without any effort 
of the will, the message goes from the eye to the hand along the 




line ERBH. But if it is necessary to deliberate about the action, 
to call in the exercise of the will, the message goes around the 
\oo^-\me^ ERQCBH', i.e. from the eye to the optic thalami, from 
them to the cerebrum, thence to the corpora striata, and so through 
the medulla to the hand.^ 

Finally, besides this fact of a message going from one part of 
the body to the brain and coming out in the motion of some other 
part of the body, there is another thing that is going on continu- 
ally, and that is this : there is a faint reproduction of some 
excitement which has previously existed in the cerebral hemi- 
spheres, and which calls up all those that have become associated 
with it. It is continually sending down faint messages which do 
not actually tell the muscles to move, but which, as it were, begin 
to tell them to move. If a man is in a brown study, with his eyes 
shut, although he apparently sees and feels nothing at all, there 
is a certain action going on inside his brain which is not sensation, 
but is like it, because it is the transmission to the cerebral hemi- 
spheres of faint messages which are copies of previous sensations. 
This continuous action of the brain depends upon the blood 
supply. 

So much for the nervous system which we have to consider in 
connection with the mind. What may we say touching facts of 
consciousness ? We may say, in the first place, that if two feel- 

1 It is scarcely necessary to point out that Clifford's account of the working of 
the, nervous mechanism is merely diagrammatic. It is, however, suflBcient for the 
purpose in hand. 



The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 301 

ings have occurred together, and one of them afterward occurs 
again, it is very likely that the other will be called up by it. That 
is to say, two states of consciousness which have taken place at 
the same moment produce a link between them, so that a repeti- 
tion of the one calls up a repetition of the other. Again, we find 
a certain train of facts between our sensations and our exertions. 
Having seen a thing, we may go through a long process of delib- 
eration as to what we shall do with it. On the other hand, by 
seeing a thing, we may quite suddenly be forced into doing some- 
thing without any chance of deliberation at all. Thus, if a cab 
comes unexpectedly around the corner of the street, we jump out 
of the way, without stopping to think that it is a desirable thing 
to get out of the way of a cab. Still again, there is the fact that 
even when there is no actual sensation and no actual exertion, 
there may be, nevertheless, a long train of facts and sensations 
which hang together. There may be faint reproductions of sensa- 
tion which are less vivid than the sensations themselves, but 
which form a series of pictures of sensations which pass contin- 
ually before my mind. And there will be faint beginnings of 
action, which latter are what we call judgments. 

Having laid this foundation for the bridge which he proposes 
to build between physical facts and mental, Cliiford continues as 
follows : ^ — 

" We have described two classes of facts ; let us now notice 
the parallelism between them. First, we have these two parallel 
facts, that two actions of the brain which occur together form a 
link between themselves, so that the one being called up the other 
is called up ; and two states of consciousness which occur together 
form a link between them, so that when one is called up the 
other is called up. But also we find a train of facts between 
the physical fact of the stimulus of light going into the eye and 
the physical fact of the motion of the muscles. Corresponding 
to a part of that train, we have found a train of facts between 
sensation, the mental fact which corresponds to a message arriving 
from the eye, and exertion, the mental fact which corresponds to 
the motion of the hand by a message going out along the nerves. 
And we have found a correspondence between the continuous 
action of the brain and the continuous existence of consciousness 
apparently independent of sensation and exertion. 

1 Op. cit., pp. 50 ff. 



302 Mind and Matter 

" But let us look at this correspondence a little more closely ; 
we shall find that there are one or two things which can be estab- 
lished with practical certainty. In the first place, it is not the 
whole of the physical train of facts which corresponds to the 
mental train of facts. The beginning of the physical train con- 
sists of light going into the eye and exciting the retina, and then 
of that wave of excitation being carried along the optic nerve to 
the ganglion. For all we know, and it is a very probable thing, 
the mental fact begins here, at the ganglion. There is no sensa- 
tion till the message has got to the ganglion, for this reason, that 
if you press the optic nerve behind the eye you can produce the 
sensation of light. It is like tapping a telegraph, and sending a 
message which has not come from the station from which it ought 
to have come ; nobody at the other end can tell whether it has 
come from that station or not. The optic ganglion cannot tell 
whether this message which comes along the nerve has come from 
the eye or is the result of a tapping of the telegraph, whether it 
is produced by light or by pressure upon the nerve. It is a fact 
of immense importance that all these nerves are exactly of the 
same kind. The only thing which the nerve does is to transmit 
a message which has been given to it ; it does not transmit a mes- 
sage in any other way than the telegraph wire transmits a mes- 
sage — that is to say, it is excited at certain intervals, and the 
succession of these intervals determines what this message is, not 
the nature of the excitation which passes along the wire. So that, 
if we watched the nerve excited by pressure, the message going 
along to the ganglion would be exactly the same as if it were the 
actual sight of the eye. We may draw from this the conclusion 
that the mental fact does not begin anywhere before the optic 
ganglion. Again, a man who has had one of his legs cut off can 
try to move his toes, which he feels as if they were still there ; 
and that shows that the consciousness of the motor impulse which 
is sent out along the nerve does not go to the end to see whether 
it is obeyed or not. The only way in which we know whetlier 
our orders, given to any parts of our body, are obeyed, is by hav- 
ing a message sent back to say that they are obeyed. If I tell 
my hand to press against this blackboard, the only way in which 
I know that it does press, is by having a message sent back by 
my skin to say that it is j)ressed. But supposing there is no skin 
there, I can have the exertion that precedes the action without 



The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 303 

actually performing it, because I can send out a message, and 
consciousness stops with the sending of the message, and does not 
know anything further. So that the mental fact is somewhere or 
other in the region BOOB of the diagram, and does not include 
the two ends. That is to say, it is not the whole of the bodily 
fact that the mental fact corresponds to, but only an intermediate 
part of it. If it just passes through the points BB^ without 
going round the loop from to (7, then we merely have the sensa- 
tion that something has taken place — we have no voice in the 
nature of it and no choice about it. If it has gone round from 

to (7, we have a much larger fact — we have that fact which we 
call choice, or the exercise of volition. We may conclude, then, — 

1 am not able in so short a space as I have to give you the whole 
evidence which goes to an assertion of this kind; but there is 
evidence which is sufficient to satisfy any competent scientific 
man of this day, — that every fact of consciousness is parallel to 
some disturbance of nerve matter, although there are some ner- 
vous disturbances which have no parallel in consciousness, properly 
so called, that is to say, disturbances of my nerves may exist which 
have no parallel in my consciousness. 

"We have observed two classes of facts and the parallelism 
between them. Let us next observe what an enormous gulf there 
is between these two classes of facts. 

" The state of a man's brain and the actions which go along 
with it are things which every other man can perceive, observe, 
measure, and tabulate ; but the state of a man's own consciousness 
is known to him only, and not to any other person. Things 
which appear to us and which we can observe are called objects or 
phenomena. Facts in a man's consciousness are not objects or 
phenomena to any other man; they are capable of being obsers^ed 
only by him. We have no possible ground, therefore, for speaking 
of another man's consciousness as in any sense a part of the physical 
world of objects or phenomena. It is a thing entirely separate 
from it ; and all the evidence that we have goes to show that the 
physical world gets along entirely by itself, according to practically 
universal rules. That is to say, the laws which hold good in the 
physical world hold good everywhere in it — they hold good with 
practical universality, and there is no reason to suppose any- 
thing else but those laws in order to account for any physical fact ; 
there is no reason to suppose anything but the universal laws of 



304 Mind and Matter 

mechanics in order to account for the motion of organic bodies. 
The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye, 
or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and 
the train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when 
there is no stimulus and no exertion, — these are perfectly com- 
plete physical trains, and every step is fully accounted for by 
mechanical conditions. In order to show what is meant by that, 
I will endeavor to explain another supposition which might be 
made. When a stimulus comes into the eye there is a certain 
amount of energy transferred from the ether, which fills space, to 
this nerve ; and this energy travels along into the ganglion, and 
sets the ganglion into a state of disturbance which may use up 
some energy previously stored in it. The amount of energy is 
the same as before by the law of the conservation of energy. 
That energy is spread over a number of threads which go out to 
the brain, and it comes back again and is reflected from there. It 
may be supposed that a very small portion of energy is created in 
that process, and that while the stimulus is going around the loop- 
line it gets a little push somewhere, and then, when it comes back 
to the ganglion, it goes away to the muscle and sets loose a store 
of energy in the muscle so that it moves the limb. Now the ques- 
tion is. Is there any creation of energy anywhere ? Is there any part 
of the physical progress which cannot be included w^ithin ordinary 
physical laws ? It has been supposed, I say, by some people, as it 
seems to me merely by a confusion of ideas, that there is, at some 
part or other of this process, a creation of energy ; but there is no 
reason whatever why we should suppose this. The difficulty in 
proving a negative in these cases is similar to that in proving a 
negative about anything which exists on the other side of the 
moon. It is quite true that I am not absolutely certain that the 
law of the conservation of energy is exactly true ; but there is no 
more reason why I should suppose a particular exception to occur 
in the brain than anywhere else. I might just as well assert that 
whenever anything passes over the Line, when it goes from the 
north side of the Equator to the south, there is a certain creation 
of energy, as that there is a creation of energy in the brain. If I 
chose to say that the amount was so small that none of our present 
measurements could appreciate it, it would be difficult or indeed 
impossible for anybody to disprove that assertion ; but I should have 
no reason whatever for making it. There being, then, an absence 



The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 305 

of positive evidence that the conditions are exceptional, the reasons 
which lead us to assert that there is no loss of energy in organic 
any more than in inorganic bodies are absolutely overwhelming. 
There is no more reason to assert that there is a creation of energy 
in any part of an organic body, because we are not absolutely sure 
of the exact nature of the law, than there is reason, because we do 
not know what there is on the other side of the moon, to assert that 
there is a sky-blue peacock there with forty-five eyes in his tail. 

" Therefore, it is not a right thing to say, for example, that 
the mind is a force, because if the mind were a force we should be 
able to perceive it. I should be able to perceive your mind and to 
measure it, but I cannot ; I have absolutely no means of perceiving 
your mind. I judge by analogy that it exists, >and the instinct 
which leads me to come to that conclusion is the social instinct, as 
it has been formed in me by generations during which men have lived 
together ; and they could not have lived together unless they had 
gone upon that supposition. But I may very well say that among 
the physical facts which go along at the same time with mental 
facts there are forces at work. That is perfectly true, but the two 
things are on two utterly different platforms — the physical facts 
go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by them- 
selves. There is a parallelism between them, but there is no 
interference of one with the other. Again, if anybody says that 
the will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is 
nonsense. The will is not a material thing, it is not a mode of 
material motion. Such an assertion belongs to the crude mate- 
rialism of the savage. The only thing which influences matter is 
the position of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding 
matter. It may be conceived that at the same time with every 
exercise of volition there is a disturbance of the physical laws; 
but this disturbance, being perceptible to me, would be a physical 
fact accompanying the volition, and could not be the volition 
itself, which is not perceptible to me. Whether there is such a 
disturbance of the physical laws or not is a question of fact to 
which we have the best of reasons for giving a negative answer ; 
but the assertion that another man's volition, a feeling in his con- 
sciousness which I cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical 
facts which I may perceive, — this is neither true nor untrue, but 
nonsense ; it is a combination of words whose corresponding ideas 
will not go together. 



30G Mind and Matter 

" Thus we are to regard the body as a physical machine which 
goes by itself according to a physical law, that is to say, is auto- 
matic. An automaton is a thing which goes by itself when it is 
wound up, and we go by ourselves when we have had food. Ex- 
cepting the fact that other men are conscious, there is no reason 
why we should not regard the human body as merely an exceed- 
ingly complicated machine which is wound up by putting food 
into the mouth. But it is not merely a machine, because conscious- 
ness goes with it. The mind, then, is to be regarded as a stream 
of feelings which runs parallel to, and simultaneous with, a certain 
part of the action of the body, that is to say, that particular part 
of the action of the brain in which the cerebrum and the sensory 
tract are excited." 

I have quoted Clifford at such length because it is really 
important that we should gain a distinct idea of the sort of reason- 
ing that leads men to become adherents of the doctrine of parallel- 
ism, and from no writer can we gain it more clearly than from 
Clifford. Those familiar with the progress of modern psychological 
theory will see that, had he lived to the present day, he would 
probably have been inclined to modify his statements in a few 
particulars. He might, for example, have avoided the use of 
such a phrase as "the consciousness of the motor impulse." Such 
details are, however, of trifling importance here, and need not 
occupy our attention. 

The first thing that strikes us is the close similarity of much 
of his reasoning to the argument of Descartes. Indeed, if we 
leave out of view the Cartesian soul with its definite place in the 
brain, we may almost say that Clifford's argument is a mere ex- 
pansion of that of Descartes, and an expansion which has been 
made possible by the fact that we have gradually acquired a some- 
what more detailed account of the functioning of the brain than 
was possessed by man in the seventeenth century. That the 
nervous discharge takes a short cut through the brain in the case 
of reflex movements and follows a circuitous path when movements 
are voluntary was then unknown. 

It must be admitted, however, that the reader of Clifford's force- 
ful paragraphs is in danger of supposing that we know more of the 
intimate structure and of the functioning of the brain than we 
actually do know. His cheerful optimism carries one along in 
an uncritical mood, and one has to remind oneself tliat such a 



The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 307 

statement as, "two actions of the brain which occur together 
form a link between themselves, so that the one being called 
up the other is called up," does not rest upon an independent 
basis of direct observation, but is an inference from the fact 
of the association of ideas, at least in most instances. Much 
of Descartes' cerebral physiology was hypothetical, and it is not 
too much to say the same of the cerebral physiology of our 
own day.^ In this reflection those who do not wish to accept 
the doctrine of the physical automaton may take such comfort 
as they can. 

Again, the clear distinction which Clifford draws between 
mind and brain, his recognition of the fact that they must not 
be made members of the same series, is due to his appreciation 
of the fact that treating the soul as Descartes does simply turns 
it into a material thing. He follows Spinoza in insisting that 
mind and brain are things different in kind, and that they must 
not be unequally yoked together. ^ 

But to gain a somewhat closer view of this parallelism between 
mental facts and physical, and to see the bridge that Clifford pro- 
poses to throw over the gulf which separates them, we must follow 
one more extract from the lecture we have been considering. It 
reads thus : ^ — 

" Again, let us consider what takes place when we perceive 
anything by means of our eye. A certain picture is produced 
upon the retina of the eye, which is like the picture on the ground- 
glass plate in a photographic camera; but it is not there that 
the consciousness begins, as I have shown before. When I see 
anything there is a picture produced on the retina, but I am not 
conscious of it there ; and in order that I may be conscious the 
message must be taken from each point of this picture along the 
special nerve-fibres to the ganglion. These innumerable fine nerves 
which come away from the retina go each of them to a particular 
point of the ganglion and the result is that, corresponding to that 
picture at the back of the retina, there is a disturbance of a great 

1 See my paper on "Psychology and Physiology," in the Psychological Meview 
for January, 1896. 

2 Besides the internal evidence of the influence of Spinoza's thought furnished 
by Clifford's papers, "Body and Mind" and "On the Nature of Things-in- them- 
selves," we have the direct testimony of his friend and biographer, Sir Frederick 
Pollock. See the introduction to the "Lectures and Essays." 

8 Op.cit., pp. 61 ff. 



308 Mind and Matter 

number of centres of gray matter in the ganglion. If certain parts 
of the retina of my eye, having light thrown upon them, are dis- 
turbed so as to produce the figure of a square, then certain little 
pieces of gray matter in this ganglion, which are distributed we 
do not know how, will also be disturbed, and the impression cor- 
responding to that is a square. Consciousness belongs to this 
disturbance of the ganglion, and not to the picture in the eye ; 
and therefore it is something quite different from the thing which 
is perceived. But at the same time, if we consider another man 
looking at something, we shall say that the fact is this — there 
is something outside of him which is matter in motion, and that 
which corresponds inside of him is also matter in motion. The 
external motion of matter produces in the optic ganglion some- 
thing which corresponds to it, but is not like it. Although for 
every point in the object there is a point of disturbance in the 
optic ganglion, and for every connection between two points in 
the object there is a connection between two disturbances, yet 
they are not like one another. Nevertheless they are made of the 
same stuff; the object outside and the optic ganglion are both 
matter, and that matter is made of molecules moving about in 
ether. When I consider the impression which is produced upon 
my mind of any fact, that is just a part of my mind ; the impres- 
sion is a part of me. The hall which I see now is just an impres- 
sion produced on my mind by something outside of it, and that 
impression is a part of me. 

*'We may conclude from this theory of sensation, which is 
established by the discoveries of Helmholtz, that the feeling which 
I have in my mind — the picture of this hall — is something cor- 
responding, point for point, to the actual reality outside. Though 
every small part of the reality which is outside corresponds to a 
small part of my picture, though every connection between two 
parts of that realit}'- outside corresponds to a connection between 
two parts of my picture, yet the two things are not alike. They 
correspond to one another, just as a map may be said in a certain 
sense to correspond with the country of which it is a map, or as a 
written sentence may be said to correspond to a spoken sentence. 
But then I may conclude from what I said before that, although 
the two corresponding things are not alike, yet they are made of 
the same stuff. Now what is my picture made of? IMy picture 
is made of exceedingly simple mental facts, so simple that I only 



The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 309 

feel them in groups.^ My picture is made up of these elements ; 
and I am therefore to conclude that the real thing which is outside 
me, and which corresponds to my picture, is made up of similar 
things; that is to say, the reality which underlies matter, the 
reality which we perceive as matter, is that same stuff which, 
being compounded together in a particular way, produces mind. 
What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, 
is You ; but then that which I call your brain, the material fact, is 
merely my perception. Suppose we put a certain man in the 
middle of the hall, and we all looked at him. We should all have 
perceptions of his brain ; those would be facts in our conscious- 
ness, but they would be all different facts. My perception would 
be different from the picture produced upon you, and it would be 
another picture, although it might be very like it. So that cor- 
responding to all those pictures which are produced in our minds 
from an external object, there is a reality which is not like the 
pictures, but which corresponds to them point for point, and which 
is made of the same stuff that the pictures are. The actual reality 
which underlies what we call matter is not the same thing as the 
mind, is not the same thing as our perception, but it is made of 
the same stuff. To use the words of the old disputants, we may 
say that matter is not of the same substance as mind, not homo- 
ousion, but is of like substance, it is made of similar stuff differ- 
ently compacted together, homoiousion." 

With the exception of this last bridge connecting mental facts 
with physical, Clifford regards the whole of what he has said as a 
body of doctrine accepted by all competent persons who have con- 
sidered the subject. There may be, he thinks, some differences of 
opinion as to particular points, but the doctrine is the doctrine of 
Science ; it is the doctrine of the parallelism of mental states to 
cerebral motions. This bridge, which cannot yet be considered to 
be a part of the accepted doctrine of science, but which Clifford 
regards as satisfactorily reaching from shore to shore, is the identity 
of mind and brain. Science must accept the fact that mind and 
brain are associated — that there is a parallelism ; and since all 
the consciousness we know of is associated with certain complex 

1 1 have in the foregoing omitted Clifford's argument to prove that consciousness 
is made up of these simple mental facts. It will he more convenient to discuss it 
later, and its omission here need not affect our conception of the sort of " bridge" 
he is essaying to huild. 



310 Mind and Matter 

forms of matter, it seems reasonable to assume that there is no 
consciousness not associated with matter. We have here, how- 
ever, only a provisional probability. But, on the other hand, the 
fact that mind and brain are associated in a certain definite way 
affords a strong presumption that we have here something that can 
be explained^ a presumption that it is possible to find a reason for 
this exact correspondence. If such a reason can be found, we are 
no longer compelled to rest content with a provisional probability, 
but we have the highest assurance that Science can give us, an 
assurance amounting to practical certainty, that there is no mind 
without a brain. 

Now, writes Clifford, if that particular explanation which he 
has ventured to offer should turn out to be the true one, the case 
becomes even stronger. If mind is the reality which appears to 
us as brain-action, then the supposition of mind without brain is a 
contradiction.^ In the above-quoted extract the reader has met 
with the sentence, " What I perceive as your brain is really in 
itself your consciousness, is You." If we are to take such a state- 
ment at all literally, it is manifestly a contradiction to speak of 
mind without brain, for mind is brain. The two cannot be 
divorced because they are the same thing, and in the strictest sense 
of that ambiguous word same. But if we thus read Clifford, we 
cannot but see that his bridge is not so much a bridge as rather a 
denial of the existence of the gulf which it was proposed to bridge 
over. He seems to be arguing that two shores run parallel to each 
other, and must run parallel to each other because they are not 
really two shores, but are one and the same shore, and there is no 
gulf. 

It is surely unfair to take Clifford's statements of the identity 
of mind and brain quite so literally. If mind and brain are strictly 
the same thing, it seems foolish to go on talking as though we had 
here two things. Parallelism itself disappears, for it is absurd to 
say that a thing is parallel with itself. And the reader who has 
followed carefully the statements contained in the last long extract 
which I have given cannot have failed to see that it was not in- 
tended to make mind and brain strictly identical with each otlier, 
but merely to make them identical in some looser sense of the word. 
Of course, the looser the sense in which the word is taken, the 
less clear is it that it is a contradiction to speak of mind without 

1 Op. cit., p. 60. 



The Automaton Tlieory : Faralldism 311 

brain, and the less sure are we of the solidity of the " bridge " 
which Clifford has built for us. That his own ideas about this 
"bridge " were decidedly nebulous seems clear even from what is 
said in the above-mentioned extract. It appears worth while to 
point this out briefly now, though the whole matter will have to be 
discussed later more thoroughly. 

In the extract the dramatis personce to whom we seem to be 
introduced at the outset are: an external object, which we will 
call a square ; a retinal image of that object, which is also square ; 
a disturbance of the ganglion, which we have no reason to believe 
square; and a mental image, which is a square. Consciousness, 
Le. the mental image, belongs to the disturbance of the ganglion, 
and, as this is something quite different from the external object, 
consciousness also is something quite different from the external 
object. 

In this scheme, there seems to be no doubt about the fact that 
the mental image is one thing and the external object another. 
There are even two things mentioned as between them in some 
sense of the word — the retinal image and the disturbance of the 
ganglion. No reason is apparent why this scheme should not serve, 
no matter what the particular character of the external object may 
be. That is to say, we have every reason to believe that an ex- 
ternal brain will be related to the retinal image of the brain, to the 
corresponding disturbance of the ganglion, and to the mental image 
of the brain, just as an external square is to its retinal image, 
ganglionic disturbance, and mental image. 

In the latter part of the extract, however, we learn with sur- 
prise that if we place a man's brain in the midst of a hall and look 
at it, our perceptions will not be identical with each other, but 
they will all be identical with the brain in question (" that which I 
call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception "). 
The brain seen is thus not an external thing at all, and cannot be 
placed in the above scheme at two removes from the perception or 
mental image. It is the mental image itself ; and now the external 
thing is not a brain, but something very different — it is some 
one else's consciousness (" what I perceive as your brain is really 
in itself your consciousness, is You" ). 

The correspondence or parallelism, then, seems to be not be- 
tween mind and brain, but between the mind of one man and the 
mind of another. But if this be so, why are we told that the actual 



312 Mind and Matter 

reality which underlies what we call matter is not the same thing 
as the mind, is not the same thing as our perception, but is made 
of the same stuff ? Does this mean simply that when we have a 
perception which we call the brain of another man, we may assume 
that there corresponds to this, unperceived by us, certain other 
perceptions of various sorts that we may call the mind of the other 
man ? But, even if we assume this to be true, does it not seem 
rather odd to say that certain perceptions in one mind are identi- 
cal with certain more or less different perceptions in another — to 
say that " what I perceive as your brain is really in itself your con- 
sciousness " ? It is this identity or quasi-identity of the two that 
furnishes Clifford with his " bridge." Can nothing better be said 
for this " bridge " than what is said in the preceding sentences ? 

As matters stand, there may be parallelism, but there seems to 
be no identity whatever except perhaps an identity of kind^ and 
the "bridge" simply disappears. Yet there are few who read 
Clifford's pages without being impressed by the fact that there is 
at least some plausibility in his theory. The source of this plausi- 
bility I shall investigate in the next chapter, where I shall subject 
the conception of parallelism to a preliminary criticism, leaving 
out of view some of the difficulties which have come to the 
surface just above, and which it is convenient to reserve for later 
discussion. 



CHAPTER XX 

WHAT IS PARALLELISM? 

In this chapter I shall assume that there is a world of 
material things, including human bodies, without inquiring very 
narrowly how we are to conceive this world, and in what sense it 
is external. 

Descartes' study of the human body led him to believe, as we 
have seen, that the nervous system is more directly the organ of 
mind than is anything else in the body, and that the brain is, so to 
speak, the very citadel of the place. The modern science of cere- 
bral psychology has continued the investigation which he began, 
and has continued it along the same lines. Although we may be- 
gin by speaking somewhat vaguely of mind and body, we always 
end, when we wish to be exact, by speaking of mind and brain, or 
rather of this or that mental phenomenon and this or that part of 
the brain. Infinite labor has been expended in the effort to deter- 
mine with accuracy and in all possible detail the correspondences 
between mental activity and cerebral activity, and this labor has 
not been wholly without result. The localization of cerebral func- 
tions is not an empty phrase to any one who has examined the 
results which have so far been obtained. 

The supposition that these results as a whole may, in the fur- 
ther progress of science, have to be abandoned, may be dismissed 
as unworthy of serious attention. They may undoubtedly be 
modified in detail, but we have every reason to believe that the 
method of research which has led to their formulation is a sound 
one, and that it will one day give us results far more complete 
and satisfactory. It is no more absurd to regard some particular 
manifestation of consciousness as related to the activity of some 
particular part of the brain, than it is to think of consciousness as 
related to the brain as a whole, instead of thinking of it as vaguely 
related to the whole body. And the same sort of evidence that 
inclines us to regard the brain as the special organ of conscious- 

313 



314 Mind and Matter 

ness may incline us to particularize still more. How far we are 
justified in going is solely a question of evidence, and it is a 
rash man who will undertake to set an arbitrary limit to such 
investigations. 

That the progress of science has ousted the Cartesian soul from 
its place in the pineal gland will be a matter of small regret to 
those who have given the subject adequate attention. That soul 
was not a soul at all ; that is to say, it was not a consciousness, 
but was a material thing that could be located in this part of the 
brain or in that, like the veriest lump of matter. And any soul 
that the interactionist is inclined to put in its place must, since it 
is to take its place and become a cog in a material mechanism, be 
itself a material thing, and not a something of a different order. 

He who truly realizes this loses his inclination to be an inter- 
actionist, and he casts about for some other way of conceiving the 
relation of mind and brain. He is pretty sure to become an ad- 
herent of the doctrine of parallelism, and to say with Professor 
Clifford and many others that physical phenomena and mental 
phenomena must not be conceived as patched together into one 
sj^stem, but must be conceived as belonging to different orders, 
must be relegated to separate series which never intersect one 
another. It is a fair question to ask : Just how much does a man 
mean by the word, when he speaks of physical phenomena and 
mental as being parallel ? The word may, like most words, be 
abused, and its use may be an occasion of falling into more or less 
serious error. 

One cannot follow the arguments which have led to the adop- 
tion of the doctrine of parallelism without assuming, at least pro- 
visionally, the existence of an external world of things and of 
minds perceived to be distinct from them. A material object 
exists ; I perceive it ; the object makes an impression upon the 
retina of the eye ; as a result of this a certain disturbance is set 
up somewhere in the brain ; I have a mental image of the object. 
The object is one thing, the impression upon the retina another, 
the cerebral change still another, and the mental image something 
distinct from all of these. Investioration seems to show that the 
mental image is more intimately related to the cerebral disturbance 
than to any other motion of matter, and we say tliat the mental 
image and the cerebral disturbance are parallel. How much have 
we a right to mean by this ? 



What is Parallelism? 315 

For one thing, we evidently mean that these two things are so 
related that the existence of the one may be taken as evidence of 
the existence of the other. Given the cerebral disturbance, the 
mental image is given ; and given the mental image, the cerebral 
disturbance is given. The one may be taken as a sign or as a 
guarantee of the other. 

We evidently mean, moreover, that the mental image does not 
belong to the same series with the cerebral disturbance, and hence 
cannot interact with it. Neither can cause the other ; neither can be 
the effect of the other. Any attempt to put them in such a rela- 
tion partakes, as Clifford expresses it, of " the crude materialism 
of the savage " ; and although this relationship may be cloaked by 
ambiguity of expression or by inconsistency of statement, it be- 
comes unmistakable when we try to conceive quite clearly just 
what interaction implies. 

When this second point is borne well in mind, we realize that 
there are certain ways in which we must not think of the parallel- 
ism of the mental and the physical. 

We must not conceive of a man's mind as lying beside his brain 
in space, as we do conceive of parallel lines as lying beside each 
other. We must not think of it as fitted to his brain as a gilt halo 
is fitted to the head of a saint in a picture by Fra Angelico. The 
warning is by no means superfluous, for the error appears to be a 
very easy one to fall into. We are all apt to talk as though the 
relation of mind and brain were more or less analogous to this ; 
and when, before our classes, we attempt to make clear certain 
psychological facts by the aid of diagrams upon a blackboard, we 
place brains and ideas side by side, as though they really occurred 
side by side in nature. The endeavor to point out to the student 
that this diagrammatic representation is faulty is met by the trium- 
phant query : " When a man goes to Europe, may we not assume 
that he takes his mind with him ? " 

And the man of science may deprecate dogmatism on the sub- 
ject of mind and matter, and may declare himself to be without 
any hypothesis whatever, and yet we may find him, when he per- 
mits himself " to suggest a rough and crude analogy," writing as 
follows : " That the brain is the organ of consciousness is patent, 
but that consciousness is located in the brain is what no psycholo- 
gist ought to assert; for just as the energy of an electric dis- 
charge, though apparently on the conductor, is not on the conductor 



316 Mind md Matter 

but in all the space round it; just as the energy of an electric cur- 
rent, though apparently in the copper wire, is certainly not all in 
the copper wire, and possibly not any of it; so it may be that the 
sensory consciousness of a person, though apparently located in his 
brain, may be conceived of as also existing like a faint echo in 
space, or in other brains, though these are ordinarily too busy and 
preoccupied to notice it."^ 

Thus certain cases of supposed thought-transference are ren- 
dered comprehensible by the suggestion that two saints may, so to 
speak, touch halos, and enter into a mystical spiritual communion. 
There is nothing in this conception that strikes the average man 
as inherently absurd, at least until he has thought the matter over 
with a good deal of patience, because his first impulse is always to 
put minds in space, where brains are. But when he realizes that 
the parallelism in question cannot be a spatial one, he begins to 
see that the relation of mind and brain is something that cannot 
be so easily grasped. 

And if this relation is not a spatial one, we cannot assume that 
the mind is present to the brain in any ordinary sense of that word. 
If mind and brain really do belong to two different orders of exist- 
ence which do not intersect, we cannot say that, when a given 
cerebral disturbance is present, a certain mental state is present, 
without admitting that we are using the word in a sense quite dis- 
tinct from the usual one. We must remember that the mind is 
neither in the brain nor near the brain. 

It is worth Avhile to repeat over and over again, since it is so 
easy to become oblivious of the fact, the statement that my mind, 
which is supposed to be parallel to my brain and to no other, is not 
a whit nearer to my brain than it is to the brain of the Emperor 
of China or to that of the Pope of Rome. Of course, it is not 
further from my brain than from either of these, but it certainl}^ is 
not nearer. Near and far have no meaning when we are not speak- 
ing of spatial relations ; and when one thing is supposed to have a 
place in space and another is not, it is absurd to try to measure 
the distance between them. When, therefore, we speak of a mind 
and of a brain as being parallel, we must be most careful not to 
conceive of the mind and of the brain as present to each other in 
any ordinary sense of the word, or as near to each other. This is 

1 Professor Oliver J. Lodge, " Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Re- 
search," Part V, p. 191. 



What is Parallelism F 317 

an important matter, for all sorts of strange results may follow 
from our allowing ourselves to fall into such confusions. 

It must be admitted that it is exceedingly difficult to use lan- 
guage that will not suggest such confusions. No man tries more 
earnestly than Clifford to relegate mind and matter to different 
and distinct worlds. Yet when he speaks of a message carried 
from the eye to the brain, he tells us, " the mental fact does not 
begin anywhere before the optic ganglion." ^ A little farther on 
he says : " The mental fact is somewhere or other in the region 
RCCB of the diagram," which means that it is somewhere in the 
region of the optic thalami, the cerebral hemispheres, and the corpora 
striata. The body, he tells us, is not merely a machine, because 
consciousness " goes with it," and he reiterates that " mental facts 
go along with the bodily facts." ^ He informs us that the action 
which goes on in a brain may be looked at "from the mental 
side." 3 

Such statements may be so interpreted as not to be misleading, 
but there can be no question of what they suggest to the uncritical 
reader. There can, I think, be as little question of what they sug- 
gested to Clifford himself, and this I shall endeavor to bring out 
shortly. Meanwhile, I wish to insist upon the fact that those who 
talk of the parallelism of mind and brain constantly speak as though 
a particular mind and a particular brain were parallel in some physi- 
cal sense, were near each other and could go together somewhat as do 
a man and his shadow — which illustration suggests to my mind a 
good instance of the fact that this really is the effect upon men's minds 
of reading the words of the parallelists. Professor James, after 
an examination of Clifford's doctrine, thus characterizes it : " The 
mind-history would run alongside of the body-history of each man, 
and each point in the one would correspond to, but not react upon, 
a point in the other. So the melody floats from the harp-string, 
but neither checks nor quickens its vibrations ; so the shadow runs 
alongside the pedestrian, but in no sense influences his steps."* 

Such misleading expressions are often used even by those who 
are ready to warn us that we must not be misled by them. Thus 
in an early work by Professor Bain we find the following : " All 
feelings have a Physical Side^ or relation to our bodily organs ; the 
sensations, for example, arise on the stimulation of a special organ 

1 "Lectures and Essays," London, 1879. "Body and Mind," p. 57. 

2 Ibid., p. 58. 8 Ihid., p. 59. * " Psychology," Vol. I, p. 133. 



318 Mind and Matter 

of sense ; and both sensations and emotions have a characteristic 
outward display or expression, which indicates their existence to a 
spectator. I include in the description of each feeling whatever 
is known of its physical accompaniments. The feeling proper, 
or the Mental Side^ has its relationships exhausted under the 
three fundamental attributes of Mind — Feeling, Volition, and 
Intellect." ^ 

Manifestly, Professor Bain does not intend us to take such 
expressions as "mental side" and "physical side" at all literally, 
for he has already said only a few pages back : " It has always 
been a matter of difficulty to express the nature of this concomi- 
tance, and hence a certain mystery has attached to the union of 
mind and body. The difficulty is owing to the fact that we are 
apt to insist on some kind of local or space relationship between 
the Extended and the Unextended. When we think of connec- 
tion it is almost always of connection in space ; as in supposing one 
thing placed in the interior of another. This last figure is often 
applied to the present case. Mind is said to be internal to, or 
within, the body. Descartes localized mind in the pineal gland ; 
the Schoolmen debated whether the mind is all in the whole body, 
or all in every part. Such expressions are unsuitable to the case. 
The connection is one of dependence^ but not properly of local 
union." 2 

These sentences are sufficiently clear and unmistakable. They 
constitute a vigorous warning against the error of conceiving that 
a given mind " goes along with " a given body as his shadow goes 
along with a pedestrian. But the man who reads them forgets 
them when he comes to the account of the physical side and of the 
mental side of feelings. He then thinks of the concomitance of 
mind and body after a material analogy, and he draws from this, 
according to his humor, either an argument against parallelism or 
an explanation which seems to make parallelism the most natu- 
ral thing in the world. This is a point of such importance that I 
must illustrate it at length. 

First, as to the argument against parallelism. Professor James 
finds concomitance in the midst of absolute separateness an utterly 
irrational notion : " It is to my mind quite inconceivable that con- 
sciousness should have nothing to do with a business that it so 
faithfully attends. And the question, * What has it to do?' is 

1 "Mental and Moral Science," London, 1808, p. 18. * jud.^ p. 4. 



What is Parallelism? 319 

one which psychology has no right to 'surmount,' for it is her 
plain duty to consider it. . . . If feelings are causes, of course 
their eifects must be furtherances and checkings of internal cere- 
bral motions of which, in themselves, we are entirely without 
knowledge. It is probable that for years to come we shall have to 
infer what happens in the brain either from our feelings or from 
motor effects which we observe. The organ will be for us a sort 
of vat in which feelings and motions somehow go on stewing 
together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we 
catch but the statistical result." ^ 

It is evident that one who can conceive of motions and feelings 
as stewing together in the same vat has not distinguished them as 
belonging to different orders. They are both in the one vat, i.e. 
they are both material, and the problem of their relation to each 
other cannot be a serious one. As an interactionist, Professor 
James has, of course, the right to make mind material if he wishes 
to do so. But the part of the above extract in which we are espe- 
cially interested is that which preceded his casting feelings into the 
vat. He speaks of consciousness attending cerebral changes, and 
he finds it inconceivable that it should so faithfully do this unless 
there be some causal connection between them. It is interesting 
to inquire : Why does this seem to him an inconceivability ? Why 
does something else seem to him more natural^ 

To this question I think that but one answer can be given. 
Professor James is aware that the parallelist would be shocked to 
think of feelings and motions as " stewing together," and that he 
tries to conceive of them as belonging to distinct and independent 
orders. Yet he hears him speak of a concomitance, of a parallelism, 
of feelings and motions as " going along together." He thinks of 
the consciousness that attends cerebral changes as attending them 
as a man's shadow attends him. The shadow moves when the 
man moves, stops when he stops, and reproduces with slavish 
exactitude all the eccentricities of his behavior. Is it conceivable 
that such a parallelism should exist in the absence of all causal 
connection ? What becomes of the method of concomitant varia- 
tions if men and their shadows may be regarded as so faithfully 
attending each other when united by no bond of causality ? Must 
we repudiate the illustration of the moon and the tides, and all the 
other classical examples upon which our minds have been nourished 
1 " Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 136-138. 



320 Mmd and Matter 

ever since the publication of Mill's " Logic " ? If we accept concomi- 
tance as evidence of some sort of causal connection everywhere 
else, why not accept it when we come to consider the concomitance 
of feelings and cerebral changes ? 

Were the two kinds of concomitance the same, there could be 
no question of the justice of the argument. But the tacit assump- 
tion that they are the same ought not to be allowed to pass without 
challenge. If the parallelist is right., feelings must not be assigned 
any local habitation whatever. They are not in the brain ; they 
are not even near the brain ; they do not move about when the 
brain moves, nor stop moving when it stops. Feelings parallel to 
one brain are quite as much in or on or about another brain as they 
are in or on or about it. 

This is a truth that it is difficult for the psychologist to bear 
steadfastly in mind. He says to us : " Take a sentence of a dozen 
words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then 
stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think 
of his word as intently as he will ; nowhere will there be a con- 
sciousness of a whole sentence."^ But if minds are not in space 
and must not be conceived as localized at all, why bring the men 
together? The minds are not farther apart if the men be con- 
ceived as distributed over four continents. Nearness of body has 
nothing whatever to do with nearness of mind. It is only when 
we localize, i.e, materialize, mind, that we are inclined to think 
that when two men stand near to each other their minds must be 
near to each other too. 

The concomitance of mind and brain is, then, conceived b}^ the 
parallelist, when he is true to his doctrine, to be a concomitance of 
a quite peculiar kind, and one to which no parallel can be found 
anywhere else. It is absolutely unique. 

When we connect the motion of the moon with the flow of the 
tides, we are dealing exclusively with a mechanical order of things, 
and we are assigning to certain motions in matter their place of 
antecedent and consequent in that mechanical world-order. All 
the positions and motions of matter with which we are concerned 
belong to the one order, and are clearly susceptible of connection 
into one series. But when we think of certain mental phenomena 
as concomitant with the changes in a given brain, we are not justi- 
fied in assuming that tliis implies that the phenomena of the two 
1 James, "Psychology," Vol. I, p. 100. 



What is Parallelism? 321 

orders can be arranged in the one series. He who assumes this 
simply overlooks the fact that he has distinguished between two 
orders of things, and he reduces them to one. As well endeavor 
to arrange in the same series changes in the position of a moon 
and changes in the position of the drops of water which compose 
a tidal wave, when, by hypothesis, the space in which the one 
series of changes takes place is not continuous with that which is 
the scene of action of the other. 

When Professor James argues that concomitance must be re- 
garded as evidence of causal relationship, he is evidently thinking 
of physical concomitance, and what force the argument seems to 
have is borrowed from a confusion of concomitance of this kind with 
concomitance of a very different kind. When one clearly realizes 
that the consciousness which " attends " the molecular changes in 
a particular brain is not there where the brain is, and is no nearer 
to this particular brain than it is to any other, one is less inclined 
to stitch this consciousness and this brain into the one motley gar- 
ment. It is difficult to think of things " stewing together," when 
we realize that they cannot by any possibility be forced into the 
same pot. 

But this tendency to conceive of the relation of mind and brain 
after a material analogy is like the conjurer's hat out of which may 
be drawn objects the most discrepant and incongruous. We have 
seen it yield an argument against parallelism and for interaction- 
ism. Those who have followed the history of speculative thought 
have seen emerge from it again and again a most plausible argu- 
ment for parallelism, the explanation^ in fact, which to many minds 
makes the parallelism of mental phenomena and physical phenom- 
ena seem a natural and even a necessary thing. This argument 
has its roots in a remote past, and it has influence with us because 
we inherit the conceptions which have come down from the days 
of our fathers and find it difficult to subject them to criticism. 

Descartes informs us that certain things may be known imme- 
diately by the " natural light " — among others, that where there 
are qualities or affections there must be a thing or substance to 
which these pertain. The same natural light reveals to us that 
we know a thing or substance the more clearly as we discover in it 
a greater number of qualities.^ These notions are not, of course, 
of his own manufacture. They came to him from the centuries 
1 " Principia Philosophise," I, 11. 



322 Mind and Matter 

which preceded him, and they were hoary with age when he re- 
ceived his instruction as a schoolboy at La Fleche. 

He goes on to tell us that every substance has one principal 
attribute. Thus, thinking is the principal attribute of mind, and 
extension is the principal attribute of body. The principal at- 
tribute constitutes the nature or essence of the substance.^ We 
must, hence, conceive thought and extension to be the natures of 
intelligent and corporeal substance ; and we must even conceive 
them as the thinking and extended substances themselves, as mind 
and body. To abstract the notions of thought and extension from 
the notion of substance is difficult, for the distinction is a merely 
logical one (ipsa ratione tantum diver see sunt^.^ The notion of 
substance — that which needs nothing but itself in order to exist 
— can be applied in all strictness only to God, but we may call 
mind and body substances in a looser sense of the word.^ 

Here we find material which Spinoza, the first parallelist, built 
into the structure which he reveals to us in the " Ethics," and this 
material constitutes a most important element in its composition. 
Spinoza tells us of one substance, consisting of an infinity of attri- 
butes, only two of which, thought and extension, are revealed to 
us. Each attribute expresses the essence of the one substance. 
The distinction between the attributes and the substance Spinoza 
nowhere makes clear, but the substance is supposed in some way 
to unify the attributes. The modes of the attribute extension are 
individual material things ; the modes of the attribute thought are 
individual ideas. These two sets of modes constitute two inde- 
pendent systems ; everything in the world of material things 
must be explained by a reference to physical causes, and ideas 
must find their complete explanation in the world of ideas. An 
idea cannot be caused by a motion in matter, nor can it result 
in sucli. 

Notwithstanding the fact that ideas and material things belong 
to mutually independent systems, the world of thought exactly 
mirrors the world of extension. Each corporeal thing has corre- 
sponding to it a mental thing that we may call its idea, and '' the 
order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and con- 
nection of things." But, we may ask, why should ideas and things 
thus correspond ? How are we to explain this concomitance in the 
absence of causal connection? Spinoza's answer — the only an- 

1 "Principia Philosophiaj," I, 63. 2 Jli^l^ i^ 03. » Ibid., I, 61. 



What is Parallelism? 323 

swer he has to give to the question — is contained in the scholium 
to the proposition just quoted. It reads as follows : — 

" Before going farther we should recall to mind this truth, 
which has been proved above, namely, that whatever can be per- 
ceived by infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance 
belongs exclusively to the one substance, and consequently that 
thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same 
substance, apprehended now under this, now under that attribute. 
So, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and 
the same thing, but expressed in two ways — a truth which certain 
of the Hebrews appear to have seen as if through a mist, in that 
they assert that God, the intellect of God, and the things known 
by it, are one and the same. For example, a circle existing in 
nature, and the idea, which also is in God, of this existing circle, 
are one and the same thing, manifested through different attri- 
butes ; for this reason, whether we conceive nature under the 
attribute of extension, or under that of thought, or under any 
other attribute whatever, we shall find there follows one and the 
same order, or one and the same concatenation of causes, that is, 
the same thing." ^ 

From the metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza to the specula- 
tions of the modern scientist may seem a far cry to some ; yet, as 
regards the point under discussion, the distance is so inconsiderable 
that it scarcely needs to be spanned by a bridge at all. The notion 
of substance as a something " underlying " qualities, " having " 
qualities, " explaining the coexistence " of qualities, has made its 
appearance for many centuries in philosophies the most diverse, 
and has made its influence felt unmistakably. Even in writers like 
Descartes and Spinoza, in whose pages the distinction between sub- 
stance and attributes becomes almost a vanishing one, substance 
remains as a ghost with a mission. 

Spinoza's ghost is taken over bodily Qsit venia verho) by Clifford, 

of whom we think as the typical modern parallelist, together with 

Spinoza's parallelism ; and it is made to perform the same function 

which busied it in the seventeenth century. It serves to join, by 

1" Ethics," II, 7, scholium. Spinoza's philosophy is a confluence of distinct 
and different streams. I have indicated only the one whose current seems to bring 
down to us an explanation of the parallelism of mind and body. For a fuller dis- 
cussion of the subject, I must refer the reader to my " Philosophy of Spinoza," 
Henry Holt and Co., N.Y., 1894, Introductory Note, and notes 3 and 55 ; also to 
my monograph on " Spinozistic Immortality," Ginn and Co., 1899, §§ 1-15. 



324 Mind and Matter 

the laying on of its shadowy hands, what would otherwise be kept 
asunder. When we bear this in mind, the somewhat incoherent 
statements in which Clifford describes for us the " bridge " which 
he has essayed to build between matter and mind become compre- 
hensible. As long as we only know the fact that consciousness 
and cerebral disturbances run parallel, we cannot be sure that 
some exception to the rule will not be discovered. But if we find 
an explanation for this parallelism, we may enjoy the highest assur- 
ance that science can give that there will be no exception. Behold 
the explanation : Consciousness and cerebral change are the same 
thing ; it is, hence, absurd to think of them as divorced. 

But how can they be the same thing when they cannot even 
exist in the same world, but must be relegated to different orders? 
They can be the same thing thus : " The reality which underlies 
matter, the reality which we perceive as matter, is the same stuff 
which, being compounded together in a particular way, produces 
mind. What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your con- 
sciousness, is You ; but then that which I call your brain, the ma- 
terial fact, is merely my perception." ^ " If mind is the reality or 
substance of that which appears to us as brain-action, the suppo- 
sition of mind without brain is the supposition of an organized 
material substance not affecting other substances (for if it did it 
might be perceived), and therefore not affected by them ; in other 
words, it is the supposition of immaterial matter. " ^ " The reality 
external to our minds which is represented in our minds as matter 
is in itself mind-stuff." ^ 

Now when Spinoza informs us that a circle in nature and the 
idea of that circle are the same thing, we know very well that he 
cannot mean to have us understand that they are the same in the 
strictest sense, for he finds it necessary to explain that they are tlie 
same thing " manifested through different attributes." He assures 
us that they have nothing in common, that they are not even alike, 
for a circle has a centre and a circumference, while the idea of a 
circle has neither centre nor circumference* They are only the 
same thing in that the substance underlying them is the same. 
That is to say, they themselves are not the same, but something else is 
the same with itself. 

1 "Lectures and Essays,'* London, 1870, Vol. II, pp. 63, 64. 

2/6id, p. 06. ^ Ibid, p. S7. 

* " De Intellectus Emendatione," ed. Van Vloten and Land, 1882, p. XL 



What is Parallelism f 325 

When we examine Clifford's work, we find that this is precisely 
his thought also. He is evidently speaking carelessly when he 
says, " What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your con- 
sciousness, is You," for if there is one thing upon which he wishes 
to insist more earnestly than upon anything else, it is the fact that 
your consciousness cannot by any possibility find a place among 
my perceptions. It is an ejects an outcast^ and it has no right to a 
place in the world of objects. To identify it, then, with any object^ 
is to talk nonsense, as he tells us again and again. It is clear, 
then, that he must mean the above statement of the identity of 
object and eject to be taken in a Pickwickian sense. It is the 
" reality " or " substance " that is one ; your brain and your con- 
sciousness are two distinct things. 

The distinction between substance and phenomenon is not 
more clearly drawn by Clifford than by Spinoza ; he is evidently 
using vaguely a vague word which he has inherited, with its bur- 
den of associations, from the past. He is not as impartial as 
Spinoza, for he evidently inclines in the above extracts to make the 
substance or reality identical with one set of phenomena while re- 
garding the other set as mere phenomena. But in this eccentricity 
he cannot be wholly consistent, for if he were, his " bridge " 
ivould be lost. He would have nothing to join the two sets of 
phenomena; he would have the two sets of phenomena alone, 
-and the question would remain. Why do they go together? The 
words "substance" and "reality" with their associations consti- 
tute the very being of his " bridge," and he must not and does not 
wholly rob them of their meaning. 

The same bridge is found satisfactory by others. I may cite, 
as a typical instance. Professor Hoffding, an excellent writer, and 
one who cannot be accused of a lack of sympathy with the results 
of modern science. He reasons as follows : — 

" If it is contrary to the doctrine of the persistence of physical 
energy to suppose a transition from the one province to the other, 
and if, nevertheless, the two provinces exist in our experience as 
distinct, then the two sets of phenomena must be unfolded simul- 
taneously, each according to its laws ; so that for every phenom- 
enon in the world of consciousness there is a corresponding 
phenomenon in the world of matter, and conversely (so far as 
there is reason to suppose that conscious life is correlated with 
material phenomena). The parallels already drawn point directly 



326 Mind and Matter 

to such a relation ; it would be an amazing accident if, while the 
characteristic marks repeated themselves in this way, there were not 
at the foundation an inner connection. Both the parallelism and 
the pro2)ortlo7iality between the activity of consciousness and cere- 
bral activity point to an identity at bottom. The difference which 
remains, in spite of the points of agreement, compels us to suppose 
that one and the same principle has found its expression in a double 
form. We have no right to take mind and body for two beings or 
substances in reciprocal interaction. We are, on the contrary, 
impelled to conceive the material interaction between the elements 
composing the brain and nervous system, as an outer form of the in- 
ner ideal unity of consciousness. What we in our inner experience 
become conscious of as thought, feeling, and resolution, is thus 
represented in the material world by certain material processes of 
the brain, which as such are subject to the law of the persistence 
of energy, although this law cannot be applied to the relation 
between cerebral and conscious processes. It is as though the 
same thing were said in two languages." ^ 

Again the " same thing " ! Evidently this same thing is neither 
inner nor outer. It is not to be confused with either "form of 
expression," but it is something distinct from both. Thoughts are 
not identical with cerebral activities, but the one substance under- 
lies the two. How does it come that we are inclined to regard 
this underlying something as furnishing a satisfactory explanation 
of the concomitance of things so disparate ? What is the key to 
the magic of the word " substance," which acts as an opiate upon 
the restless questionings of so many eager minds? 

To solve this problem we have only to turn to the notion of 
substance as it exists in the mind of the plain man to-day. It is 
much the same that it has been for centuries, and it does not differ 
greatly from that which has lurked in comparative obscurity in the 
minds of many philosophers who have thought that they had aban- 
doned it for something better. No man has given abetter account 
of the plain man's notion than John Locke, and it is a sympathetic 
account, for Locke casts in his lot here with the plain man : — 

" The mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great 
number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses, as they are 
found in exterior things, or by reflection on its own operations, 
takes notice also, that a certain number of these simple ideas go 

1" Outlines of Psychology," English translation, London, 1801, pp. C4, 65. 



What is Parallelism F 327 

constantly together ; which being presumed to belong to one thing, 
and words being suited to common apprehensions, and made use of 
for quick despatch, are called so united in one subject, by one 
name ; which, by inadvertency, we are apt afterward to talk of, 
and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of 
many ideas together : because, as I have said, not imagining how 
these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves 
to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from 
which they do result, and which therefore we call substance." ^ 

It is thus that we come to have the ideas of a man, a horse, 
gold, water, etc., of which substances "whether any one has any 
other clear idea, further than of certain simple ideas coexisting 
together, I appeal to every one's experience." Locke is a man of 
sense. He knows that men call a bit of wood a thing or substance 
because they have experience of the fact that a certain group of 
qualities coexist hinc et nunc, and that one such group is not to be 
confounded with another. He knows, too, that they talk as 
though they were not here dealing with a complex of experiences, 
but with " one simple idea." Finally, he knows that they are 
unwilling to regard the bundle of experiences as the whole of the 
thing, but attribute to them some obscure source or cause which 
they regard as the substance or even as the " thing." He does not 
pretend to know anything about this substance, and he calls atten- 
tion as clearly as one could wish to the fact that men only assume 
it to exist because they observe that certain qualities " go constantly 
together." One need not be a Lockian to see the justice of this 
analysis. One may agree with the plain man, or one may scout 
his notion of substance ; but the fact that he thinks of the thing in 
this way it is not reasonable to deny. 

Now it is important to notice that neither the plain man nor 
the philosopher pretends to know the substance except through its 
qualities. The conception of substance is, at bottom, but a recog- 
nition of a certain concomitance of phenomena. When we see 
an apple we can also touch it, taste it, smell it. Why can we ? 
Because the apple is there, the one apple, the reality, the sub- 
stance, the underljdng something that manifests itself to the 
various senses in these divers ways. How do we know that the 
one apple is there ? Because we can see it, touch it, taste it, smell 
it. Thus the concomitance of the phenomena guarantees the 
1" Essay Concerning Human Understanding," Book II, Chapter 23, § 1. 



328 Mind and Matter 

existence of the substance, and the presence of the substance 
explains the concomitance of the phenomena. 

It is not possible for a man to walk around in a much smaller 
<;ircle than this, yet many persons walk around in this circle with 
a good deal of satisfaction to themselves. As we watch them do 
it, a little reflection brings us to a realization of the fact that their 
behavior is not so wholly irrational as it appears on the surface. 
Their explanation of the concomitance of phenomena by their 
reference to a substance is nothing more nor less than a reference 
of this particular case of concomitance to the innumerable other 
cases of a similar concomitance furnished by their experience as 
a whole. The individual instance has been explained by being 
brought under a general law, as all individual instances of any 
sort must be in order to be explained. 

We can now understand clearly just how much force we ought 
to allow to Clifford's argument that consciousness and cerebral 
activity not only go together, but must go together. He has dis- 
covered that they are one and the same thing — not strictly one 
and the same thing, but one and the same as two manifestations of 
one and the same substance are one and the same. Stripped of its 
mysticism and of all needless obscurity, this statement amounts 
to just this: The concomitance of consciousness and cerebral 
activity is not an inexplicable thing to which no parallel can be 
found in our experience ; it is simply an instance of the con- 
comitance of " aspects " or " manifestations " which we find all 
about us when we are dealing with " substances," " things," or 
"realities." It is one of a class, not an isolated instance. In 
other words, mind and brain are related as are the color and smell 
^f the apple. 

Nothing can be clearer than that Clifford has quite forgotten 
how widely his doctrine has separated mind and brain. It puts 
them in different and independent worlds. What would we think 
of the concomitance of the qualities which constitute our notion 
of an apple, if the color always appeared in one mind, the taste in 
another, the smell in a third, and the tactual qualities in a fourth, 
the group as a whole never making its appearance in any one 
consciousness ? 

Evidently Clifford's " bridge " rests upon an obliteration of the 
distinction between mind and brain. His argument conceives of 
the concomitance of mind and brain after a material analogy ; and 



What is Parallelism f " 329 

we are inclined to view it as satisfactory only because the natural 
man is ever ready to materialize mind, to think of it as being there 
where the brain is, and as related to the brain somewhat as the one 
side of a door is related to the other. 

" It would be an amazing accident," writes Hoffding, " if, while 
the characteristic marks repeated themselves in this way, there 
were not at the foundation an inner connection." Why this 
amazement? Clearly because Hoffding assumes that we have 
abundant evidence, in our experience, of the fact that where there 
is invariable concomitance there is '• inner connection," i.e. there 
is substantial identity. But what if the concomitance of mind and 
brain be of a startlingly different sort from that observed in all 
these instances ? what if it be a something unique in our experi- 
ence? Can we assimilate it to the other instances and regard it as 
explained^ simply by invoking the magic of the word " substance " ? 
When we do this, we are explaining concomitance of one sort 
here, by pointing out that there is concomitance of a wholly 
different sort there, and that there are many instances of the 
latter. We see instances of concomitance on every hand; what 
more natural, says Hoffding, than that there should be con- 
comitance of mind and brain. In any such argument the unique- 
ness of the latter kind of concomitance is allowed to drop quietly 
out of sight: concomitance is concomitance — and the nakedness 
of our fallacy is hidden from our view by a whole apron of fig 
leaves, such as " substance," " underlying reality," " identity 
at bottom," " inner connection," " aspects," " inner and outer," 
"parallelism," and the like. 

Every one of these carries with it materialistic suggestions, 
just such suggestions as Clifford was most anxious to strip away 
from his notion of mind. If we make the concomitance of " ob- 
ject " and " eject " seem natural by using vague words which sur- 
reptitiously assimilate " ejects " to " objects," we are solving our 
problem by annihilating it. It is not worth while to point out at 
great length that a given fact is unique, and then to expend our 
ingenuity in showing that it is not unique at all, but may be 
assimilated to a multitude of other facts and thus given an 
explanation. 

The materialistic suggestion in Clifford's words is quite unmis- 
takable : " The reality which underlies matter, the reality which 
we perceive as matter, is the same stuff which, being compounded 



330 Mind and Matter 

together in a particular way, produces mind. What I perceive as 
your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You ; but then 
that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my per- 
ception." Where is the reality which we perceive as matter? 
Where are you, while I am perceiving your brain ? Are you not 
out there, where I seem to perceive the brain ? If you are not in 
this direction from my body rather than in that, if you are no 
nearer to this particular brain than to the brain of a man I never 
saw and never shall see, how comes it that I am perceiving you^ 
that you are affecting me^ when I see this brain ? Is the reality or 
substance of the brain not to be found where the brain is ? Surely 
the reader can see that Clifford's words draw all their force from 
a materialistic "outside" and "inside" conception. We have 
here the philosophy of the plain man forced to do service in a new 
field, but equipped with all its old arms and accoutrements. 

The "bridge," then, that is to unite consciousness with cere- 
bral activities turns out to be no better than a materialistic mis- 
conception. So far from explaining parallelism, if parallelism be 
rigorously adhered to, and mind and brain really kept distinct, it 
must fall. Thus we see that, whether we read the works of the 
antiparallelists or the works of the parallelists, we must be on our 
guard against being misled into conceiving of parallelism in a 
materialistic way, i.e. into virtually denying its existence. It is 
not easy to use language which may not suggest error ; the very 
word " parallelism " has associations which the doctrine that passes 
by tliat name is called into being to deny, though it is perhaps a 
trifle less objectionable than the various other words which may be 
made to serve the same purpose. Our only safety lies in not allow- 
ing ourselves to be influenced by the associations which cling to 
words, but in compelling ourselves to bear in mind just how much a 
word ought to mean when it is put to a particular use ; that is to say, 
we are only safe when we bear in mind just how far our facts go. 
This is a sort of empiricism to which no reasonable man can object. 
It is, of course, a sort of empiricism that it is by no means easy to 
carry consistently into effect. 

It may be objected that the doctrine of parallelism loses both 
its plausibility and its attractiveness when it is thus rigorously 
understood. The cerebral chanfje is admitted to be a siorn of the 
mental phenomenon, but sign and thing signified are relegated to 
orders of things so different, that all of those figures of speech by 



What is Parallelism? 331 

the aid of which we ordinarily grasp the significance of the rela- 
tionship are banished. We seem to ourselves to realize with a 
good deal of vividness what is meant by the parallelism of mind 
and brain so long as we are permitted to conceive the two as phe- 
nomena of the one substance, as manifestations of the same under- 
lying reality, as aspects of one thing, as at bottom identical, as 
having an inner connection, etc. If we lose these phrases, how 
shall we conceive it? Minds and bodies seem to float apart, and 
the imagination is left brooding upon a void. 

But in considering this objection it is well to remember that 
it is not merely against the doctrine of parallelism that it can be 
brought. Material analogies have always been pressed into the 
service of the attempt to conceive clearly what is assumed to be 
not material. How can it be otherwise ? The very words we use 
to denote mental functions of every description have been exhumed 
from the soil, torn from the world of matter, and they have been 
transported to another sphere still reeking with earthly odors. It 
is only the purgatorial fires of reflection that can purge these 
away, and they sometimes seem unequal to the task. Of what 
absurdities may one not be guilty when one has described con- 
sciousness as an "internal light "?i What is suggested to the 
mind by the word " intuition "? ^ When we speak of conscious- 
ness as an " agent ," ^ where do we get the meaning of the word ? 
What fallacies may not lurk behind the ambiguity of the phrase 
" direction of the attention " ? That one should always and under 
all circumstances keep one's mind free from the materialistic asso- 
ciations of such forms of expression, it is too much to expect, but 
it does not seem unreasonable to expect a man to exercise a jeal- 
ous watchfulness lest he be tripped up by them. 

So it is with parallelism. For the purposes of common life, 
and for the purposes of many special psychological investigations, 
it may matter little that a man loosely conceives of mind and brain 
as " manifestations," " aspects," or " sides." But if he takes such 
conceptions seriously, and builds a theory upon them, he is build- 
ing upon sand. A man is not in duty bound to be a metaphysician 
at the breakfast table, but when he does set out to be a metaphysi- 
cian, he ought to be a good one. 

1 Hamilton, "Lectures on Metaphysics," XI. 

2 McCosh, "First and Tundamental Truths," Part I, Chapters I-IV. 

3 Green, " Prolegomena to Ethics," § 32. 



CHAPTER XXI 
THE MAN AND THE CANDLESTICK 

So much for the general conception of parallelism and its justi- 
fication through the assumption of an " inner identity." It is now- 
time that we ask ourselves how the parallelist may know that 
mind and matter are parallel, even as a matter of "brute fact." 
The reflective reader will see that, as in the '^ Thousand-and-one 
Nights " the Story of the Little Hunchback leads on to the Story 
of the Christian Merchant, and that to the Story of the Sultan's 
Purveyor, so Clifford's exposition of the doctrine of parallelism, as 
found in the essay on " Body and Mind," leads naturally to the 
Story of the Man and the Candlestick. Certain difficulties, which 
enter and make their bow in the first essay, must be allowed to 
speak their lines in the second, and must step out into the glare 
of the footlights, that they may be inspected by the audience. 

We have seen that the argument for the parallelism of con- 
sciousness and cerebral activity carefully distinguishes between the 
external object, the retinal image of that object caused by rays of 
light from it entering the eye, the cerebral image due to the dis- 
turbance of the retina, which cerebral image exists in the region 
of the optic thalami, and the mental image, which constitutes the 
perception of the object. These four appear to be quite distinct 
from each other, and to be divisible into two widely different 
classes. 

The external object, the disturbed retina, and the stimulated 
ganglion belong to the one class. They are all matter in motion. 
They stand to each other in relations of causality, and the investi- 
gation of the conditions of all three falls within tlie province of 
the science of mechanics. The mental image, on the other hand, 
stands by itself. It cannot be given a place in the same series with 
the others, but it is " parallel " to one of them, to the cerebral 
image. It is not caused by the disturbance in the ganglion, but 
first comes into being with it. It is mind, the other three are mat- 

332 



The Man and the Candlestick 333 

ter, and between mind and matter there is a gulf fixed. The only 
point at which there is any hope that a " bridge " may be thrown 
across the gulf is at the cerebral disturbance, for there the mind 
seems to come, if one may use such a phrase, nearest to matter. 
Let represent the object, RI the retinal image, CI the cerebral 
image, and MI the mental image, and we may express the relations 
of the four to each other thus : — 

O RI CI^ 

MI 

We are to conceive 0, JSJ, and CI as belonging to an order of 
things in which MI can find no place. It can only be parallel to 
something which has a place in that order. 

But even in the essay in which Clifford so carefully fixes these 
distinctions, there occur certain sentences which seem to obliterate 
them and to confuse the scheme. Thus we are told that "that 
which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception." ^ 
Does this mean that is not an inhabitant of a different sphere 
from that inhabited by Mil Does it mean that it is identical with 
MI — not identical in the loose sense in which men use the word when 
they speak of one thing as being the " substance " or " underlying 
reality " of something else, but identical in a strict sense ? If is 
not something external, but is really my perception, i.e. is MI^ 
then what is the relation of CI^ which is supposed to be in the same 
world with it, and to be a thing of the same kind, to the MI with 
which it is assumed to be parallel — with which, we seem justified 
in saying, it has been proved to be parallel, if the argument for 
parallelism has any weight at all ? 

The difficulty here suggested does not have to be hunted out 
from its cover, but stalks boldly into the open and menaces us of 
its own accord, in Clifford's essay " On the Nature of Things-in- 
themselves " : — 

" Suppose that I see a man looking at a candlestick. Both of 
them are objects, or phenomena, in my mind. An image of the 
candlestick, in the optical sense, is formed upon his retina, and 
nerve messages go from all parts of this to form what we call a 
cerebral image somewhere in the neighborhood of the optic thalami 
in the inside of his brain. This cerebral image is a certain com- 
plex of disturbances in the matter of these organs ; it is a mate- 
1 " Lectures and Essays," Vol, II, p. 64. 



334 Mind and Matter 

rial or physical fact, therefore a group of my possible sensations, 
just as the candlestick is. The cerebral image is an imperfect rep- 
resentation of the candlestick, corresponding to it point for point in 
a certain way. Both the candlestick and the cerebral image are 
matter; but one material complex represents the other material 
complex in an imperfect way. 

'' Now the candlestick is not the external reality whose exist- 
ence is represented in the man's mind ; for the candlestick is a mere 
perception in my mind. Nor is the cerebral image the man's per- 
ception of the candlestick ; for the cerebral image is merely an idea 
of a possible perception in my mind. But there is a perception in 
the man's mind, which we may call the mental image; and this 
corresponds to some external reality. The external reality hears 
the same relation to the mental image that the (^phenomenal) can- 
dlestick hears to the cerehral image. Now the candlestick and the 
cerebral image are both matter ; they are made of the same stuff. 
Therefore the external reality is made of the same stuff as the 
man's perception or mental image, that is, it is made of mind-stuff. 
And as the cerebral image represents imperfectly the candlestick, 
in the same wa}^ and to the same extent the mental image repre- 
sents the reality external to his consciousness. Thus in order to 
find the thing-in-itself which is represented by any object in my 
consciousness such as a candlestick, I have to solve this question 
in proportion, or rule of three : — 

As the physical configuration of my cerebral image of the object, 

is to the physical configuration of the object, 

so is my perception of the object (the object regarded as complex 

of my feelings) 
to the thing-in-itself." ^ 

It is extremely desirable that we should get these several 
entities and their relations quite clear. According to the 
parallelistic scheme, we may try to represent them in the following 
formula : — 

C'V RT O RI CI 

M'V MI 

1 Op. rit., pp. 85, 80. It is not necessary to suppose that Clifford occupies a dif- 
ferent standpoint in his two essays. The essay on " Body and Mind " wna printed 
in the Fortnifjhtly lieviexo, December, 1874 ; that on " The Nature of Thin<is-in-them- 
Kclves " was printed in Mind, January, 1878, but it had been read before the " Meta- 
physical Society " in 1874. See Pollock's Introduction, Vol. I, p. 31). 



The Man and the Candlestick 335 

Here is the candlestick, or object ; RI is the man's retinal 
image, (7Jhis cerebral image, iHfJhis mental image ; similarly R'l' 
is my retinal image, C'T my cerebral image, and MT my mental 
image or perception. We have, thus, before us an object, the 
candlestick at which the man is looking, two brains, and two 
minds, or, at least, two perceptions, which are parallel to the two 
brains. 

But in this formula we look in vain for one of the things 
mentioned in the above extract, — the X which is to be discovered 
by the aid of the mathematical proportion with which the extract 
ends, the truly external object. To understand the significance of 
this object we have to bear in mind that Clifford does not regard 
brains as the only things in nature that have psychic parallels. 
He looks upon all nature as animated, i.e. he believes that just as 
minds correspond to cerebral activities, so something akin to con- 
sciousness, something more or less like it, mind-stuff corresponds 
in the same way to all motions in matter. " A moving molecule 
of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness ; but it 
possesses a small piece of mind-stuff. When molecules are so 
combined together as to form a film on the underside of a jelly- 
fish, the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them are so 
combined as to form the faint beginnings of sentience." ^ 

Even such a thing as a candlestick has, accordingly, we will 
not say a mind, but, at all events, a certain amount of mind-stuff. 
But Clifford regards a man's mind as the reality which we per- 
ceive as his brain, as the thing that we must conceive as truly 
external. The mind-stuff of the candlestick, and of every 
material object, must be granted a similar externality. It is the 
" reality " of the material thing ; it is the thing-in-itself , as con- 
trasted with the thing as perceived, the merely material. ^ If we 
take all these rudimentary souls into account, we must amend our 
formula as follows : — 

C'V R^^ O RI CI 



M'l' E'^'^ EI E'l' MI 

That is to say, we must recognize a world of material things, 
which belong to the one order and interact with each other accord- 
ing to the laws of mechanics ; and we must recognize that each 
material thing has as its parallel a psychic thing, which belongs to 
1 Op. cit., p. 85. 2 Qp. cii^^ p. 87. 



336 Mind and Matter 

a different order. Thus (9, the material candlestick, has as its 
parallel EI^ an external image — which I call an image, not 
because it resembles 0, but because it is supposed to be a thing of 
the same general nature as itf/ and i^'/', and which I call external 
because we are here looking at it from the point of view of the 
two latter. 

It is worthy of note that the entities in the lower line are not 
supposed to form one system as do those in the upper. This is 
evident from the fact that CI is explained by a direct reference 
to RI^ and RI by a direct reference to 0. No descent to the 
lower line appears to be necessary. But EI can only be reached 
from Mlhy passing through CZand 0. It is by this road and by 
this alone that Clifford proposes to reach it. 

I need not stop here to weigh all the considerations that 
induced Clifford to distribute minds or something like minds to 
all objects in nature. Of course, had he held a nervous system 
to be the essential concomitant of mind, there could have been no 
question as to the existence of the EI which is supposed to con- 
stitute the external candlestick. On such a supposition there i» 
no external candlestick, in this sense of the word " external," and 
the question in proportion becomes meaningless. But when a 
man has made mind the reality of brain, the substance which 
makes itself apparent as brain, the step is a short one to the attri- 
bution of minds of some sort even to candlesticks. Mind is 
the reality or substance which manifests itself as brain ; candle- 
sticks are manifestations, they appear just as brains do ; must there 
not be, in this case also, some reality that is making its appear- 
ance ? What can it be ? It must be mind, of course, or at least 
mind-stuff, for the only reality which we know directly is mind. 
Once make mind the reality of material things, and it seems 
absurd to deny that any material thing has some sort of a mind, 
for surely everything material has some sort of reality. 

If we reason thus, and assume that there must be an external 
candlestick other than 0, the manifestation, — if we reason that 
there exists also EI^ the reality underlying that manifestation, — 
then Clifford's proposed method of discovering that reality, seems, 
on the surface at least, a plausible one. (7'/', my cerebral image, 
is a manifestation, a material thing ; its reality is my mental image, 
M'l'. And is a manifestation, a material thing; its reality is 
EL If CT and were exactly alike, it would seem natural to 



The Man and the Candlestick 337 

expect M'T and EI to be exactly alike too, for where there is no 
difference in two manifestations, it seems natural that there should 
be no difference in the two underlying realities. But C'T and 
are not exactly alike. We may assume, then, that as C'T is to 0, 
so is the reality of C'l'^ i.e. my mental image, to JSI, the reality 
of 0. 

Of course, even those who have no theoretical objection to Clif- 
ford's way of reaching UI must admit that, in the existing state of 
our knowledge, it is of no value whatever, for the simple reason 
that no man knows how O'T and differ. C^F is " an imperfect 
representation of the candlestick, corresponding to it point for 
point in a certain way," but in what sense it is imperfect and how 
imperfect it is, we do not know at all. " If certain parts of the 
retina of my eye, having light thrown upon them, are disturbed so 
as to produce the figure of a square, then certain little pieces of 
gray matter in this ganglion (the optic thalami), which are dis- 
tributed we do not know how, will also be disturbed, and the 
impression corresponding to that is a square." ^ The cerebral 
image is a thing inferred; it has been directly inspected by no 
man, and what its precise nature may be is as yet not even a 
matter to be conjectured. Hence, our question in proportion 
reduces itself to this: — 

As an unknown quantity is to 0, 

So is M'T to jELZ, another unknown quantity. 

This difficulty is, however, a practical one, and it is possible 
to hope that, with the growth of human knowledge, something 
definite may come to be known about the cerebral image. There 
was a time when the retinal image was equally unknown, and now 
physiologists have a good deal to say about it. If the cerebral 
image does come to be known, our two unknown qualities will 
be reduced to one, and the search for jE'/, under such circum- 
stances, does not seem, on the face of it, absurd. 

But a far more serious difficulty than this faces us in the extract 
given above, and one which seems to threaten the destruction of 
the whole parallelistic scheme. It is this : I see a man looking at 
a candlestick. Clifford tells me that both the man and the 
candlestick are objects or phenomena in my mind. An image 
of the candlestick is formed upon the man's retina, and nerve- 
1 " Body and Mind," p. 62. 



338 Mind and Matter 

messages go from this to form a cerebral image somewhere inside 
of his brain. This cerebral image is a material fact, and is, hence, 
a group of my possible sensations, just as the candlestick is. That 
there may be no mistake about the candlestick, Clifford points 
out that it is not the external reality whose existence is repre- 
sented in the man's mind, and reiterates the statement that it is 
a mere perception in my mind. He adds that the cerebral image 
is not the man's perception of the candlestick, for the cerebral 
image is merely the idea of a possible perception in my mind. 
Now, we have seen that the parallelistic scheme as amended by 
Clifford is as follows : — 

_CT IVV O^ m^ CI 

WV Wi" EI WV MI 

This is to say, my mind is parallel with my cerebral activit}'- ; 
in the formula it is represented by MI'. This Ml' does not cor- 
respond to the whole universe of matter ; it does not correspond to 
the whole of my body ; it does not even correspond to tlie whole 
of my nervous system. It corresponds only to certain parts of my 
brain: "there is no sensation till the message has got to the 
optic ganglion, for this reason, that if you press the optic 
nerve behind the eye, you can produce the sensation of light." ^ 
Nor must we forget that everything in my mind, every perception 
that I can possibly have and every memory of a perception, must 
belong to this Ml' J^ Taken together, these things constitute the 
reality of C'l'^ which is my brain in action. 

But now we are told that and OTare my actual or possible 
sensations, since they are material facts. In other words, we are 
told that they must take their place as parts of MI'. And as RI^ 
R'l'^ and CI' are also material facts — are parts of the same mate- 
rial world with and CI^ it follows, of course, that they also must 
be regarded as my actual or possible sensations, and as constituent 
parts of MT. It is palpably absurd to put half of the material 
world in Ml'., and to banish the other half to a totally different 
sphere. Of this absurdity no parallelist worthy of the name can 
be guilty. Hence I must regard the whole of the upper row in 
our formula — my brain, my retina, the candlestick, the other 

1 '* Body and Mind," p. 61. 

2 1 speak here a little loosely, but it will not mislead the reader. More strictly, 
these things must he classed xoith MT^ as the reality of my brain in action. 



The Man and the Candlestick 339 

man's retina, his brain, and everything else that is material — 
as nothing else than my actual or possible sensations, my mind. 

Were it possible to do so, I should be glad to write out, for the 
sake of clearness, the parallelistic formula as amended to fit these 
statements. For obvious reasons the thing cannot be done. 
According to the formula, brain and mind are parallel ; they 
are not strictly identical, but are in different worlds ; the one is 
the appearance, the outside, and the other the reality, the inside. 
The physical world gets along by itself ; mental facts merely " go 
along with" physical facts with which they must never be con- 
founded. Here we are told that all the physical facts are mental 
facts, are my mental facts. With what are all these mental facts 
parallel ? Not with (7^P, for that is one among the mental facts. 
One cannot make a thing parallel with itself — at once inside and 
outside. To say that OT " goes along with " itself is mere non- 
sense, and to found a scheme of things upon such nonsense is 
nonsense in the second degree. It is as impossible to represent 
graphically such a doctrine as this, as it is to represent graphically 
the doctrine of Cassiodorus that the whole soul is in each of its 
own parts. 

I beg the reader to take this in all seriousness, for the difficulty 
does not arise out of an unfortunate turn of phrase which may be 
easily corrected. It is really fundamental. The more clearly one 
comprehends the parallelistic doctrine, the more clearly does one 
see that a fundamental distinction of two orders of being is essen- 
tial to it. There are physical facts and there are mental facts. 
Between these there is a correspondence, but the series never 
intersect. The first case of correspondence that I can establish, 
and the case from which I set out in my attempt to prove cor- 
respondence anywhere else, is the parallelism of my mind and my 
brain. I argue : as my cerebral image of the object is to the object, 
so is my perception of the object to the thing in itself, i.e. to 
the reality of the object, its mind or mind-stuff. Now I am told 
that my cerebral image of the object is not parallel to my per- 
ception of the object, a thing in a different world, but is a percep- 
tion itself and in the same mind with the other. What becomes 
of my parallelism ? 

It disappears. The doctrine of parallelism cannot retain the 
least plausibility without an external world — I mean, without a 
material external world. The material external world upon which 



340 Mind and Matter 

I have depended to establish the doctrine, Clifford has rolled 
together and put into my mind. He offers me another external 
world, it is true ; a world of other minds. In place of the candle- 
stick he puts the mind or mind-stuff of the candlestick ; in place 
of the other man's brain he puts the other man's mind. But 
where is the parallelism? Is there a parallelism between the 
candlestick (now in my mind) and the mind of the candlestick, 
which is external to my mind? Is there a parallelism between 
the other man's brain (now in my mind) and the mind of the 
other man, which is external to my mind? Clifford has taken 
great pains to prove that what is parallel to my mind and to the 
whole of my mind, including candlesticks, brains, etc., as per- 
ceived by me, is nothing else than my cerebral image or collection 
of cerebral images. The reality of the cmidlestick I see^ and of the 
brain I see, ought, then, to be some disturbance in my oivn brain. 
But what is the relation of different minds to each other, or to 
the images in each other? Of this the doctrine of parallelism as 
expounded by Clifford gives not even a hint. And if my own 
brain turns out to be nothing more than a possible perception in 
my own mind, how can I conceive my mind to be parallel with my 
brain ? The whole edifice which has been erected seems to crum- 
ble down into a shapeless heap of absurdity. 

The collapse is inevitable. The doctrine of parallelism needs 
an external material world, and cannot get on without one. Clif- 
ford uses such a world to establish the doctrine, and then tries to 
throw it away. When he wrote, the works of Berkeley and 
Hume and Mill had made their impression upon the mind of the 
public, upon the mind of the man of science, as well as upon that 
of the professional philosopher. It seemed to many that what we 
perceive as material things are only complexes of sensations. Are 
not sensations in minds ? Can they be external ? Clifford under- 
took the task of making the whole material world a part of the 
contents of a mind, and at the same time making the whole of 
that mind parallel with a part of the material world. We must at 
least yield him the admiration due to courage. 

But suppose that he had left the material world external, and 
had not substituted for it a realm of minds, would the parallelistic 
doctrine be free from difficulties ? It seems scarcely necessary to 
point out to the reader that it would meet the difliculty insepa- 
lable from every doctrine which takes its stand upon the psycho- 



The Man and the Candlestick 341 

logical standpoint. If I can know that minds and brains are 
parallel, my mind cannot wholly be shut up to the psychic con- 
comitants of brain-changes. If all my knowledge really is 
included in the MT of the formula, the rest of the formula is 
non-existent for me, and I am not a parallelist. 

To be a parallelist, such a parallelist as Clifford was while he 
was building up the argument, one must be naive ; one must shut 
the mind up to its sensations and ideas, and at the same time let it 
know an external world beyond its sensations and ideas, a world 
of material things to which sensations and ideas are parallel. The 
inconsistency is glaring, and it is little wonder that the parallelist 
tries to remove it by becoming a metaphysician. This is what 
Clifford has done. As a metaphysician he has denied the material 
world of candlesticks and brains to be external at all. But with- 
out something external he cannot get on, and he, hence, offers us a 
new externality of a different sort. He quite wrecks his parallel- 
is tic formula, it is true ; but the fact that he does so is not at 
once evident, and he may still account himself a parallelist — an 
enlightened parallelist. The fact is that he occupies two positions 
at once, that of the plain man, who is a dualist, and that of the 
subjective idealist. 

We have seen what comes of adhering half-heartedly to the 
position of the plain man, but there is danger that we may see it 
and straightway forget it. Hence, I shall make no apology for 
discussing in the following chapter The Metaphysics of the " Tele- 
phone Exchange." It ought to be of some interest both to the 
metaphysician and to the man who is accustomed to shake his 
head over metaphysicians. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE METAPHYSICS OF THE "TELEPHONE EXCHANGE" 

We are told by Professor Karl Pearson that the material of 
science is coextensive with the whole life, physical and mental, of 
the universe. The field of science is coextensive with knoivledge. 
" If there are facts, and sequences to be observed among those 
facts, then we have all the requisites of scientific classification and 
knowledge. If there are no facts, or no sequences to be observed 
among them, then the possibility of all knowledge disappeai"S." 
There are many branches of science, and some are better estab- 
lished than others, yet in all it seems possible for men to come to 
something like a practical agreement as to fundamental principles. 

" The case is quite different with metaphysics and those other 
supposed branches of human knowledge which claim exemption 
from scientific control. Either they are based on an accurate 
classification of facts, or they are not. But if their classification 
of facts were accurate, the application of the scientific method 
ought to lead their professors to a practically identical system. 
Now one of the idiosyncracies of metaph3'sicians lies in this : that 
each metaphysician has his own system, which, to a large extent, 
excludes that of his predecessors and colleagues. Hence we must 
conclude that metaphysics are built either on air or on quicksands 
— either they start from no foundation in facts at all, or the 
superstructure has been raised before a basis has been found in the 
accurate classification of facts. I want to lay special stress on this 
point. There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge 
of the universe except through the gateway of scientific metliod. 
The hard and stony path of classifying facts and reasoning upon 
them is the only way to ascertain truth. It is the reason and not 
the imagination whicli must ultimately be appealed to. Tlie poet 
may give us, in sublime language, an account of the origin and 
purpose of tlie universe, but in the end it will not satisfy our 
fpsthetic judgment, our idea of harmony and beauty, like the 

342 



The Metaphysics of the ''Telephone Exchange'' 343 

few facts which the scientist may venture to tell us in the same 
field. The one will agree with all our experiences past and present, 
the other is sure, sooner or later, to contradict our observation, be- 
cause it propounds a dogma, where we are as yet far from knowing 
the whole truth. Our sesthetic judgment demands harmony be- 
tween the representation and the represented, and in this sense 
science is often more artistic than modern art." ^ 

In a foot-note Professor Pearson tells us that it is perhaps impos- 
sible satisfactorily to define the metaphysician, but that the meaning 
he attaches to the term will become clearer later in his book. The 
above extract, taken alone, seems to make the accusation against 
him a general shiftlessness of mind, proceeding from a poetic in- 
difference to scientific method. The author regards him as a dan- 
gerous member of the community, because it is not recognized 
that he is merely a poet, and he is apt to be taken seriously. He 
is a " Portuguese of the Intellect," who endeavors to establish a 
right to the foreshore of our present ignorance, and may hinder 
the settlement in due time of vast and yet unknown continents of 
thought. This science should prevent.^ But as we read on we 
discover that the charge against this dark character is a much 
more specific one. The real head and front of his offending is not 
so much that he recklessly anticipates the cautious generalizations 
of science, as that he lays claim to a realm beyond the sphere of 
science altogether. 

From the material provided by the senses, either directly or in 
the form of stored sense-impressions, science draws conceptions. 
These are products of the reflective faculty, and they exist in the 
imagination. It is legitimate to form conceptions of things not 
directly verifiable by the senses, but so long as they are not thus 
verifiable, we are not justified in asserting that they have objective 
reality. Atoms and molecules are such conceptions. In a sense 
they are supersensuous, for no man has become directly conscious 
of them as sense-impressions, and perhaps no man ever will ; but 
this means only that they are mental conceptions which assist us in 
classifying phenomena, i.e, sense-impressions. Science has, hence, 
to do only with sense-impressions and with ideal constructs which 
are useful in helping us to arrange the same. Only what is directly 
given as sense-impression is actual. Thus the supersensuous of 
science is but a construct in the imagination ; it is made up of 

1 " The Grammar of Science," 2d ed. London, 1900, pp. 16, 17. « p. 25. 



344 Mind and Matter 

remembered sense-impressions, and it has no being in an extra 
mental world. " On the other hand, the metaphysician asserts an 
existence for the supersensuous which is unconditioned by the 
perceptive or reflective faculties in man. His supersensuous is at 
once incapable of being a sense-impression, and yet has a real 
existence apart from the imagination of men. It is needless to 
say that such an existence involves an unproven and undemon- 
strable dogma." ^ 

Since the metaphysician holds to the supersensuous in this 
sense of the word, his doctrine is " pseudo-science. "^ He fills the 
"beyond "of sense-impression with "phantasms."^ It is as an 
" unconscious metaphysician " that Professor Tate, the author of 
" The Properties of Matter," makes of matter a something beyond 
the sphere of perception.* As a something in the "beyond" of 
sense-impression, matter is a metaphysical entity meaningless for 
science.^ The statements of physicists and common-sense philos- 
ophers with regard to the nature of matter " are one and all meta- 
physical — that is, they attempt to describe something beyond 
sense-impression, beyond perception, and appear, therefore, at best 
as dogmas, at worst as inconsistencies. If we confine ourselves to 
the field of logical inference, we see in the phenominal universe 
not matter in motion, but sense-impressions and changes of sense- 
impressions, coexistence and sequence, correlation and routine."^ 
We must carefully distinguish " conceptual matter from any meta- 
physical ideas of matter as the substratum of sense-impression." -^ 
Minds which cannot wholly repress their metaphysical tendencies 
"must project their conceptions into realities beyond perception."* 
Both physicist and biologist are equally under obligations to with- 
draw "from the metaphysical limbo beyond sense-impression."® 
To recognize that the contents of the mind ultimately take their 
origin in sense-impressions removes metaphysics "from the field 
of knowledge." ^^ The phenomenal world should be distinguished 
from " the unreal products of metaphysical thought." " 

The metaphysician is, thus, a man who refuses to confine his 
world within the limits of sense-impressions and mental constructs 
of such. He attempts to pass beyond the confines, not merely of 
actual, but even of possible, human knowledge. Professor Pearson 

1 pp. 05, 96. * p. 248. 7 p. 261. lo p. 506. 

2 p. 108. 6 p. 251. 8 p. 269. " p. 606. 
«p. 117. "p. 260. »p. 337. 



The Metaphysics of the "Telephone Exchange'' 345 

reprimands him for this, and he endeavors to make clear just where 
we must place the limits of the knowable. 

He tells us that a message is carried by a sensory nerve to 
the brain. At the brain what we term the sense-impression is 
formed, and probably some physical change takes place which 
remains with a greater or less degree of persistence in the case of 
those stored sense-impressions which we term memories. "Every- 
thing up to the receipt of the sense-impression by the brain is what 
we are accustomed to term physical or mechanical ; it is a legiti- 
mate inference to suppose that what from the psychical aspect we 
term memory has also a physical side, that the brain takes for every 
memory a permanent physical impress, whether by change in the 
molecular constitution or in the elementary motions of the brain 
substance, and that such physical impress is the source of our 
stored sense-impression. These physical impresses play an impor- 
tant part in the manner in which future sense-impressions of a like 
character are received. If these immediate sense-impressions be of 
suflBcient strength, or amplitude as we might perhaps venture to 
say, they will call into some sort of activity a number of physical 
impresses due to past sense-impressions allied, or, to use a more 
suggestive word, attuned to the immediate sense-impression. The 
immediate sense-impression is conditioned by the physical impresses 
of the past, and the general result is that complex of present and 
stored sense-impressions which we have termed a ' construct.' " ^ 

Now a message which has been conducted to the brain along a 
sensory nerve may be reflected directly as an outgoing message 
along a motor nerve. In this case a sense-impression can be 
received without our recognizing it, without our being conscious. 
Again, the sense-impression received may arouse stored sense- 
impressions. In this case we are conscious, we think: "Thus 
what we term consciousness is largely, if not wholly, due to the 
stock of stored impresses, and to the manner in which these con- 
dition the messages given to the motor nerves when a sensory 
nerve has conveyed a message to the brain. The measure of con- 
sciousness will thus largely depend on (1) the extent and variety 
of past sense-impressions, and (2) the degree to which the brain 
can permanently preserve the impress of these sense-impressions, 
or what might be termed the complexity and plasticity of the 
brain." 2 

1 pp. 42, 43. 2 p. 44. 



346 Mind and Matter 

So far Professor Pearson does not appear to have said anything 
very much out of harmony with the usual parallelistic scheme. 
There are such things as human bodies. They are acted upon by 
other things. Wlien the resulting message is conveyed to the 
brain along a nerve there arises a mental something called a sense- 
impression. Remembered sense-impressions have their parallels in 
cerebral activities, as well as new sense-impressions. All mental 
constructs are composed of sense-impressions and the revivals of 
such. The language used seems here and there a trifle careless, 
as, for instance, when it is said tliat the brain receives the sense- 
impression, or that the physical impress in the brain is the source 
of stored sense-impressions. The distinction between physical 
and mental is by no means so well and clearly drawn as it is by 
Clifford. Nevertheless, it is drawn fairly well ; we have here 
contrasted the "psychical aspect" and the "physical side," the 
" elementary motions of the brain substance " and the " sense- 
impressions." 

To make more clear the view of brain activity which he em- 
braces. Professor Pearson compares the brain to the central office 
of a telephone exchange from which wires radiate to various 
senders and receivers of messages. To this figure he frequently 
recurs,^ and the position of the mind is regarded as analogous to 
that of the clerk shut up in such an exchange and incapable of 
getting nearer to his customers than his end of the telephone 
Avires. What can such a clerk know of the world beyond his little 
office ? In the necessary limitations of his knowledge we have a 
true image of the limitations of all our knowledge. The passage 
in which this doctrine is best brought out reads as follows : — 

"We are accustomed to talk of the 'external world,' of the 
' reality ' outside us. We speak of individual objects having an 
existence independent of our own. The store of past sense- 
impressions, our thoughts and memories, although most probably 
they have beside their psychical element a close correspondence 
with some physical change or impress in the brain, are yet spoken 
of as inside ourselves. On the other hand, althougli if a sensory 
nerve be divided anywhere short of the brain we lose the corre- 
sponding class of sense-impression, we yet speak of many sense- 
impressions, such as form and texture, as existing outside ourselves. 
How close then can we actually get to this supposed world outside 
1 pp. 44-40, 00-03, 108, 153, 240, 241. 



The Metaphysics of the ''Telephone Exchange" 347 

ourselves ? Just as near but no nearer than the brain terminals of 
the sensory nerves. We are like the clerk in the central telephone 
exchange who cannot get nearer to his customers than his end of 
the telephone wires. We are indeed worse off than the clerk, for 
to carry out the analogy properly we must suppose him never to 
have been outside the telephone exchange^ never to have seen a customer 
or any one like a customer — in shorty never, except through the tele- 
phone wire, to have come in contact with the outside universe. Of 
that ' real ' universe outside himself he would be able to form no 
direct impression ; the real universe for him would be the aggre- 
gate of his constructs from the messages which were caused by the 
telephone wires in his office. About those messages and the ideas 
raised in his mind by them he might reason and draw his infer- 
ences ; and his conclusions would be correct — for what? For the 
world of telephonic messages, for the type of messages which go 
through the telephone. Something definite and valuable he might 
know with regard to the spheres of action and of thought of his 
telephonic subscribers, but outside those spheres he could have no 
experience. Pent up in his office he could never have seen or 
touched even a telephonic subscriber in himself. Very much in 
the position of such a telephone clerk is the conscious ego of each 
one of us seated at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves. Not 
a step nearer than those terminals can the ego get to the ' outer 
world,' and what in and for themselves are the subscribers to its 
nerve exchange it has no means of ascertaining. Messages in the 
form of sense-impressions come flowing in from that 'outside 
world,' and these we analyze, classify, store up, and reason about. 
But of the nature of ' things-in-themselves,' of what may exist at 
the other end of our system of telephone wires, we know nothing 
at all. 

" But the reader, perhaps, remarks : ' I not only see an object, 
but I can touch it. I can trace the nerve from the tip of my finger 
to the brain. I am not like the telephone clerk, I can follow my 
network of wires to their terminals and find what is at the other 
end of them.' Can you, reader ? Think for a moment whether 
your ego has for one moment got away from his brain-exchange. 
The sense-impression that you call touch was just as much as sight 
felt only at the brain end of a sensory nerve. What has told you 
also of the nerve from the tip of your finger to your brain ? Why, 
sense-impressions also, messages conveyed along optic or tactile 



348 AEnd and Matter 

sensory nerves. In truth, all you have been doing is to employ 
one subscriber to your telephone exchange to tell you about the 
wire that goes to a second, but you are just as far as ever from 
tracing out for yourself the telephone wires to the individual sub- 
scriber and ascertaining what his nature is in and for himself. The 
immediate sense-impression is just as far removed from what you 
term the ' outside world ' as the store of impresses. If our telephone 
clerk had recorded by aid of a phonograph certain of the messages 
from the outside world on past occasions, then if any telephonic 
message on its receipt set several phonographs repeating past 
messages, we have an image analogous to what goes on in the 
brain. Both telephone and phonograph are equally removed from 
what the clerk might call the ' real outside world,' but they enable 
him through their sounds to construct a universe ; he projects 
those sounds, which are really inside his office, outside his office, 
and speaks of them as the external universe. This outside world 
is constructed by him from the contents of the inside sounds, which 
differ as widely from things-in-themselves as language, the symbol, 
must always differ from the thing it symbolizes. For our telephone 
clerk sounds would be the real world, and yet we can see how con- 
ditioned and limited it would be by the range of his particular 
telephone subscribers and by the contents of their messages. 

" So it is with our brain ; the sounds from telephone and 
phonograph correspond to immediate and stored sense-impres- 
sions. These sense-impressions we project as it were outwards 
and term the real world outside ourselves. But the thinfjs-in- 
themselves which the sense-impressions symbolize, the ' reality,' 
as the metaphysicians wish to call it, at the other end of the 
nerve, remains unknown and is unknowable. Reality of the ex- 
ternal world lies for science and for us in combinations of form 
and color and touch — sense-impressions as widely divergent from 
the thing ' at the other end of the nerve ' as the sound of the 
telephone from the subscriber at the other end of the wire. We 
are cribbed and confined in this world of sense-impressions like the 
exchange clerk in his world of sounds, and not a step beyond can 
we get. As his world is conditioned and limited by his particular 
network of wires, so ours is conditioned by our nervous system, by 
our organs of sense. Their peculiarities determine what is the 
nature of the outside world which we construct. It is the simi- 
larity in the organs of sense and in the perceptive faculty of all 



The Metaphysics of the " Telephone Exchange " 349 

normal human beings which makes the outside world the same, or 
practically the same, for them all. To return to the old analogy, 
it is as if two telephone exchanges had very nearly identical 
groups of subscribers. In this case a wire between the two 
exchanges would soon convince the imprisoned clerks that they 
had something in common and peculiar to themselves. That con- 
viction corresponds in our comparison to the recognition of other 
consciousness." ^ 

The statements made in this extract may be accepted as fairly 
typical of those made throughout the book from which it is taken. 
What can we learn from them touching the necessary limitations 
of human knowledge ? The ego is likened to a clerk who has 
never been outside of his telephone exchange. Of the " real " 
universe outside itself it can form no direct impression — the real 
universe must be for it the aggregate of its constructs from the 
messages which have been brought to it along the nerves. It is 
true that we are apt to " speak of many sense-impressions, such as 
form and texture, as existing outside ourselves." But this is error. 
Sense-impressions can exist only in the brain-exchange. When we 
suppose ourselves to be tracing the course of a nerve from finger- 
tip to brain, we forget that we are dealing with sense-impressions. 
The ego cannot for a moment get away from its brain-exchange, 
and all that it feels, it feels there and nowhere else. The clerk 
perceives nothing but sounds, and out of them he constructs a uni- 
verse. These sounds " are really inside his office," but he projects 
them outside his office and speaks of them as the external universe. 
So it is with the ego ; its immediate and stored sense-impressions 
correspond with sounds received and sounds which have been 
received before ; these sense-impressions the ego projects as it were 
outwards, and terms them the real world outside itself. As the 
clerk is confined to this world of sounds, so the ego is " cribbed 
and confined " in the world of sense-impressions, and cannot get a 
step beyond it. 

The limits to knowledge here laid down appear at first sight to 
be sufficiently definite and unmistakable. In many other passages 
they are as emphatically affirmed. " We are now in a position to 
see what is meant by 'reality' and the 'external world.' Any 
group of immediate sense-impressions we project outside ourselves 
and hold to be part of the external world. As such we call it a 

1 pp. 60-63. 



350 Mind and Matter 

phenomenon^ and in practical life term it real." ^ " It is idle to 
postulate shadowy unknowables behind that real world of sense- 
impression in which we live. So far as they affect us and our con- 
duct they are sense-impressions ; what they may be beyond is 
fantasy, not fact ; if indeed it be wise to assume a heyond^ to postu- 
late that the surface of sense-impressions which shuts us in, must 
of necessity shut something beyond out."^ " Human thought has 
its ultimate source in sense-impressions, beyond which it cannot 
reach." ^ " The mind is absolutely confined within its nerve- 
exchange ; beyond the walls of sense-impression it can logically 
infer nothing."* 

The complete isolation of the ego from everything beyond its 
immediate and stored sense-expressions — in other words, from 
everything beyond itself — which it seems to be the purpose of 
these statements to maintain, could have been made clearer by 
Professor Pearson in his picture of the telephone clerk, had he 
brought out more distinctly the fact that, just as the clerk has 
never seen a customer, or anything like a customer, so he has never 
seen even a telephone exchange or anything like a telephone 
exchange. 

The clerk is, by hypothesis, absolutely confined to his messages, 
and his world is wholly composed of messages heard and remem- 
bered. A telephone is not to be confounded with a message or 
with any construct of such. Any wire that can mean anything at 
all to such a clerk, all of whose knowledge is confined to sounds, 
must be a complex of sounds. That the clerk has a body, and that 
this body is placed in a telephone exchange, he cannot possibly 
know as an ordinary clerk is supposed to know these things. He 
does not perceive the telephones about his body; he perceives 
nothing but sounds. May we say that his body, the telephones, 
the wires, and the subscribers, are beyond his world? 

First we must ask what the word '' beyond " can mean to him. If 
a man has absolutely no conception of anything but sounds, then 
the word, to have any meaning at all to him, must be interpreted 
in terms of sound. Beyond the sounds he knows, are, perhaps, 
other sounds. What else can the word " beyond " mean? If all 
significance be denied it, the word says nothing at all. If it is to 
be given a content, however indefinite, it must be a sound-content. 

So it is with the ego seated in the brain-exchange. That it is 
1 pp. 03-04. a p. 73. « p. 74. * p. 108. 



The Metaphysics of the ^'Telephone Exchange'^ 351 

seated there, and even that there is a brain-exchange, it cannot 
possibly know, if the brain-exchange is not a mere construct of 
sense-impressions, and is not itself in the ego. We speak loosely 
when we say that the ego can get no nearer to the external world 
"than the brain-terminals of the sensory nerves." Have we not 
seen that the very nerve that we trace from finger-tip to brain is 
a group of sense-impressions, and wholly in the ego ? It is foolish 
to speak of sense-impressions as either near to or far from the 
external world. The external world is notliing but a group of 
sense-impressions. The brain is in the ego^ not the ego in the 
brain. The brain telephone exchange is, thus, a construct in the 
mind, and to say that the whole mind is in the brain -exchange, and 
cannot get beyond it, seems to be mere nonsense. 

Professor Pearson might, I repeat, have made all this clearer in 
his figure of the clerk. It would, to be sure, have resulted in the 
instant dismissal of the clerk, as a logical monstrosity. However, 
a number of things that he says later in his book bring out the 
truth very clearly, and we see that the clerk really must be dis- 
missed. 

We find that space is something peculiar to the individual per- 
ceptive faculty; it is our mode of perceiving sense-impressions. 
The self, seated " metaphorically, not physically," in the telephonic 
brain-exchange, classes together some groups of the messages 
which come to it, "and speaks of them as objects existing in 
space." Space and the things in space, are, thus, mental con- 
structs.^ Time is also a mode of perception ; " time is the percep- 
ception of sequence in stored sense-impressions — the relationship 
of past perceptions with the immediate perception. Thus time 
involves in its essence memory and thought — in other words, con- 
sciousness.'^'' Space has been termed an external^ and time an 
internal., mode of perception ; but the distinction is not a good one, 
for both are "dependent on the association of immediate and 
stored sense-impressions." ^ And motion, which is the combina- 
tion of space with time, is a mode of perception too. It is not 
even ?ifact of perception, for "a sense-impression in itself cannot be 
said to move ; it is there at the brain-terminal or not there ; " ^ "of 
the universe as contained in messages received at the brain tele- 
phonic exchange, or of groups of sense-impressions, we cannot 
assert motion — objects appear, disappear, and reappear ; sense- 

1 pp. 152-157. 2 pp. 181-185. 3 p. 249. 



352 Mind and Matter 

impressions alter and modify their grouping. Change is the right 
word to apply to them rather than motion. It is in the field of con- 
ception solely that we can properly talk of the motion of bodies ; it 
is there, and there only, that geometrical forms change their position 
in absolute time — that is, move." ^ The mind absolutely rebels 
against the notion of anything moving but these conceptual crea- 
tions, which are unrealizable in the field of perception. ^ Motion is 
" a pure conception, which may describe perceptual changes, but 
cannot be projected into the phenomenal world without involving 
us in inexplicable difficulties."^ 

Thus space, time, and motion are forms of perception. It is 
only mental constructs that can exist in space and time and can 
move. It follows that mechanism which implies the geometrical 
motions of geometrical forms is a product of conception, is a men- 
tal construct and nothing more.* It is " no reality of the phenome- 
nal world." ^ We have seen above that only a metaphysician 
could be so lost to all sense of propriety as to make it a reality 
of a world beyond phenomena. 

We must, then, hold firmly to the truth that the " messages " 
that are "conveyed along optic or tactile sensory nerves," that 
" come flowing in " from the outside world, exist only in the imagi- 
nation of the ego. Indeed, the whole telephone exchange — 
office, wires, and everything else — can exist nowhere else. Is 
it not conceived as a something spread out in space and existing 
in time ? Is it not a mechanism ? Where can a mechanism exist 
unless in consciousness ? If, then, the ego dreams of itself as in 
a telephone exchange, it must realize, on reflection, that it is 
wholly inconceivable that it should really be in a telephone ex- 
change beyond consciousness, and receiving messages from such 
a '' beyond." What becomes of a telephone exchange if we deny 
extension in space to the office and to the wires, and motion to the 
messages ? How can we conceive of the clerk at one end of the 
wire and the subscriber at the other when the wire has no extension 
whatever? Nothing lies "between" clerk and subscriber (assum- 
ing both to exist), for, since space, time, and motion can exist only 
in the imagination of clerk or subscriber, there can be no "be- 
tween," in any intelligible sense of the word, unless it exist in 
the imagination of the one or the imagination of the other. Both 
ends of the only conceivable " wire " lie in the same imagination, 

1 pp. 241-242. a p. 241. » p. 272. * p. 240. ^ p. 325. 



The Metaphysics of the " Telephone Exchange " 353 

and the message which is conveyed along it, is conveyed "in 
conception." The telephone exchange, then, if there be such a 
thing, exists solely within the ego; it is a construct of sense- 
impressions. As a device for making clear the relations between 
egos^ or between an ego and anything else beyond it, it is a mani- 
fest absurdity. 

It seems, then, as clear as anything can be, that the telephone 
exchange is a tree upon which we mount, and which we then 
proceed to pull up after us. First, it is outside of the ego ; the 
ego is in the tree, and is no nearer to the ground than is the branch 
upon which it is perched. Next, the tree is in the ego^ and no 
tree can be conceived that is not in an ego. The first view of 
the tree may be represented thus : — 

GI EI 

E 

Here is some object, such as a candlestick ; RI is my retinal 
image of the object ; CI is my cerebral image, as Clifford called it, 
the brain-disturbance resulting from the message sent from HI; 
Ij is the ego seated at the brain-exchange. Of 0, E can know 
nothing whatever except as a message is propagated to CI. It 
is "there," at (TZ, and gets nothing whatever but sense-impressions 
which appear in it when there are "elementary motions of the 
brain-substance." 

According to the second view, 0, RI^ 01^ the distances which 
separate them, and the motions in which they are concerned, are 
all constructs of sense-impressions ; they are really inside E. What, 
then, can it mean, if I say that E can get no nearer to than 
or? that it is "cribbed and confined" in (7/? that it cannot know 
as it is in itself ? Is anything but a group of sense-impres- 
sions projected, " as it were, outwards " ? 

The two views are palpably inconsistent with each other, but 
it would be hasty to assume that they cannot be held simultane- 
ously, for there is abundant evidence that Professor Pearson does 
hold them simultaneously. When he resolutely pulls up his tree 
he is lost — his scheme of things disappears. To keep clerk and 
subscribers in any intelligible relations with each other, he must 
let it down again at once, and this he proceeds to do. He is evi- 
dently trying to keep it at once up and down — in short, he finds 
it impossible to " wholly repress his metaphysical tendencies," and 

2a 



354 Mind and Matter 

must project his conceptions into " realities beyond perception," 
while denying that they may be so projected. So abundant is 
the material illustrative of this fact, that it is puzzling to know 
what passages to select. 

The lengthy extract which I have given above fairly bristles 
with statements that imply that we are to conceive of the ego as 
in the telephone exchange, and not of the teleplione exchange as 
in the ego. We are told that our thoughts and memories most 
probably have "beside their psychical element a close correspond- 
ence with some physical change or impress in the brain"; that 
we can get no nearer to the supposed outside world " than the 
brain-terminals of the sensory nerves " ; that " we are like the clerk 
in the central telephone exchange who cannot get nearer to his 
customers than his end of the telephone wires " ; that the conscious 
ego of each one of us is " seated at the brain-terminals of the 
sensory nerves " ; that it has no means of ascertaining " what in 
and for themselves are the subscribers to its nerve exchange "; that 
" messages in the form of sense-impressions come flowing in from 
that ' outside world,' " but *' of what may exist at the other end 
of our system of telephone wires, we know nothing at all " ; that 
the sounds which the telephone clerk projects outside his office 
"are really inside his office"; that the things-in-themselves which 
the sense-impressions symbolize, the things "at the other end 
of the nerve," remain unknown and are unknowable ; that sense- 
impressions are " as widely divergent from the thing ' at the other 
end of the nerve ' as the sound of the telephone from the sub- 
scriber at the other end of the wire " ; that as the clerk's world 
" is conditioned and limited by his particular network of wires, 
so ours is conditioned by our nervous system, by our organs of 
sense " ; that " it is the similarity in the organs of sense and in 
the perceptive faculty of all normal human beings which makes 
the outside world the same, or practically the same, for them all." 

These statements mean, if they mean anything, that the nerves 
and brain are to be distinguished carefully from the sum total of 
tlie immediate and stored sense-impressions which arise when cer- 
tain physical motions have taken place in nerves and brain. It 
seems mere incoherence to repeat them, and at the same time to 
understand that the nerves and brain under discussion are only 
mental constructs in the brain-exchange, i.e. are at the brain- termi- 
nals of these same nerves. What becomes of our telephone ex- 



The Metaphysics of the "Telephone Exchange" 355 

change if we conceive the office with all its apparatus, and the 
whole network of wires connected therewith, to be gathered up 
and drawn into the imprisoned clerk ? Is there any conceivable 
sense in which we can regard him as imprisoned, " cribbed and 
confined," when he has swallowed his prison ? How can he be at 
one end of a wire when the whole wire is within him ? 

If he is to remain at a brain-exchange at all, it must be at the 
exchange of a brain that is not in him as his construct. The 
statements quoted above affirm him to be in such an exchange. 
Similar statements abound elsewhere in Professor Pearson's book. 
He supposes himself, for example, to turn quickly in his chair and 
to knock his knee against the edge of the table. He tells us that 
a message is carried by a sensory nerve from the affected part to 
the brain. " At the brain what we term the sense-impression is 
formed. "1 

Now, are we to suppose the chair, table, knee, nerve, and brain 
here referred to, to be merely in Professor Pearson's ego ? At what 
brain, then, does the sense-impression come into being? In what 
" exchange " is the whole complex of immediate and stored sense- 
impressions ? " Self, seated (metaphorically, not physically) in 
the telephonic brain-exchange, receives an infinite variety of mes- 
sages, which we can only assume to reach self in precisely the 
same manner. Yet self classes some groups of these messages 
together, and speaks of them as objects existing in space, while to 
other groups it has denied in the past, or still denies, this spatial 
existence."^ Are we to regard the telephonic brain-exchange in 
which the self is seated, are we to regard the sources from which 
it received an infinite variety of messages, as nothing more than 
groups of messages in the self, merely " spoken of " as existing in 
space? Surely, we are not to suppose that Professor Pearson 
penned the above sentence with the intention of making it clear 
that the self is not in the telephonic brain-exchange, but that the 
telephonic brain-exchange is a construct in the self and is merely 
" spoken of " as existing in space ! It is scarcely necessary to mul- 
tiply citations, for the significance of those given is quite unmis- 
takable. There is, however, one oft-recurring phrase which must 
not be allowed to pass without examination. 

We have seen that, near the close of the lengthy extract which 
likens the ego to the telephone clerk, we are told that " it is the 

1 p. 42. 2 p. 153. 



356 Mind and Matter 

similarity in the organs of sense and in the perceptive faculty of 
all normal human beings which makes the outside world the same, 
or practically the same, for them all." What are we to under- 
stand by this " perceptive faculty " ? What is it ? Is it a construct 
of sense-impressions, or is it something beyond sense-impres- 
sions ? The role which it is supposed to play is certainly an 
important one ; it has laid upon its shoulders the duty of construct- 
ing the universe : " The brain in the individual man is probably 
considerably influenced by heredity, by health, by exercise, and by 
other factors, but speaking generally the physical instruments of 
thought in two normal human beings are machines of the same 
type, varying indeed in efficiency, but not in kind or function. 
For the same two normal human beings the organs of sense are 
also machines of the same type and thus within limits only 
capable of conveying the same sense-impressions to the brain. 
Herein consists the similarity of the universe for all normal human 
beings. The same type of physical organ receives the same sense- 
impressions and forms the same ' constructs.' Two normal per- 
ceptive faculties construct practically the same universe." ^ 

From this passage it is clear that the perceptive faculty is but 
another name for the brain at whose " exchange " the ego is supposed 
to have its seat. The same seems to be indicated by the words which 
precede the quotation given just before : " As his (the clerk's) world 
is conditioned and limited by his particular network of wires, so 
ours is conditioned by our nervous system, by our organs of sense. 
Their peculiarities determine what is the nature of the outside 
world which we construct." 

The perceptive faculty is, then, the brain ; and by the expres- 
sion " the organs of sense and the perceptive faculty " we can 
mean only the nervous system as a whole. Of course, when one 
means the brain, it is better to say the brain, than to say the per- 
ceptive faculty. The latter is an ambiguous form of expression 
drawn from a psychology now pretty generally abandoned, and 
supposed to be most affected by those who are most given over to 
metaphysical speculation. The brain is a physical thing; does it 
not sound odd to say that the perceptive faculty is a physical 
thing? The sense-impression is formed at the brain ; does it sound 
well to say that it is formed at the perceptive faculty? The 
expressions are scarcely interchangeable, and it seems unwise to 

1 p. 47. 



The Metaphysics of the "Telephone Exchange'' 357 

abandon the one which is the most direct and unambiguous for the 
other, which is more vague, and which comes to us burdened 
with the associations which it has gathered from a mediseva] 
metaphysics. 

It is clear that in the above passage Professor Pearson means 
by the perceptive faculty the brain. It is not equally clear that 
he means this every time that he uses the expression ; but where- 
ever his meaning is at all distinctly indicated it seems reasonable 
to assume that this is his meaning. He writes : " How far does 
this routine of sense-impressions depend upon the perceptive 
faculty : How far does it lie outside that faculty in the unknown 
and unknowable beyond of sensation? The question is one to 
which at present no definite answer can be given, and perhaps one 
to which no answer can ever be found. If, with the materialists, 
we make matter the thing-in-itself, we throw the routine back on 
something behind sense-impressions, and, therefore, unknowable. 
Precisely the same happens if, with Berkeley, we attribute the 
routine to the immediate action of a deity. Materialist and 
idealist are here at one in casting the routine of sense-impression 
into the unknowable. But the business of the scientist is to know, 
and therefore he will not lightly assent to throwing anything into 
the unknowable so long as known ' causes ' have not been shown 
to be insufficient. The scientific tendency would therefore be to 
consider the routine of our perceptions as due in some way to the 
structure of our perceptive faculty before we appeal to any super- 
sensuous aid." 1 

This scientific tendency Professor Pearson holds to be reason- 
able on the ground that we have evidence that the perceptive fac- 
ulty is a selective machine. We have, he says, only to walk abroad 
with a dog in order to discover this. We find that "the percep- 
tive faculty in the dog selects certain sense-impressions, and these 
form for it reality ; that of the man selects another and probably 
far more complex range, which form in turn reality for him. 
Both may be again compared to automatic sweetmeat boxes, 
which only work on the insertion of coins of definite and different 
value." 2 But, " there is another point which undoubtedly deserves 
notice. Our sense-impressions are indeed complex in their group- 
ing, but they come to us by very few and comparatively simple 
channels ; namely, through the organs of sense. The simplicity of 
1 pp. 101, 102. 2 p. 103. 



358 Mind and Matter 

the scientific law may therefore be partly conditioned by the sim- 
plicity of the modes in which sense-impressions are received." ^ 

From these passages it seems reasonably clear that the percep- 
tive faculty is the brain. It is contrasted with the organs of 
sense, and it is suggested that the routine of our perceptions may 
be due in part to one and in part to the other. The illustration of 
the sorting-machine is taken up again immediately afterwards : 
" In some such way as this, perhaps, we may look upon that great 
sorting-machine — the human perceptive faculty. Sensations of 
all kinds and magnitudes ma}^ flow into it, some to be rejected at 
once, others to be sorted all orderly, and arranged in place and 
time. It may be the perceptive faculty itself, which, without our 
being directly conscious of it, contributes the ordered sequence in 
time and space to our sense-impressions. The routine of percep- 
tion may be due to the recipient, and not characteristic of the 
material." This seems to make the ordering of sense-impressions 
a less mysterious thing — the whole of ordered nature is seen to be 
the product of one mind, the mind " associated with the machinery 
of nervous organization." ^ 

We find here, of course, certain loosenesses of expression, but 
some oscillations must be expected of one who has perched himself 
upon such a limb as that upon which the champion of the tele- 
phone exchange elects to sit. Why say that ordered nature is tlie 
product of one mind^ when we have made the brain — the human 
perceptive faculty — the source of the arrangement of sense-im- 
pressions ? " Our only experience of thought is associated with the 
brain of man ; no inference can possibly be legitimate which carries 
thought any farther than nervous systems akin to him."^ Thus 
when man and dog walk abroad together, the difference in their 
worlds must be due to differences in senses and in brains. The 
sorting-machine, the last strainer that lets in or keeps out sense- 
impressions, must be cerebral. To identify this sorting-machine 
with the sense-impressions sorted by it would be pure incoherence ; 
to make of it a " metaphysical " entity, a phantom not to be identi- 
fied with brain, nerves, or sense-impressions, would not be consist- 
ent with Professor Pearson's philosophy. We must assume that 
by perceptive faculty he means brain, and no other brain than the 
one at whose " exchange " the ego finds itself, and of whose " sort- 
ings" it constructs its world. 

1 p. 100. 2 p. 107. » p. 74. 



The Metaphysics of the '^ Telephone Exchange'' 359 

It seems as clear as anything can be that in all these passages 
Professor Pearson has let his tree down again — it is now not in 
him, but he is in it. The clerk really is in the telephone exchange ; 
there are wires about him, and the exchange and the wires, as well 
as the customers, are " beyond " him ; they must be carefully dis- 
tinguished from the world of sounds which he constructs. They 
constitute the sorting-machine ; he is the material sorted out. He 
comes into being in the exchange, and he does not come into being 
until the messages have completed their journey along the wires 
from the subscriber. It is palpably absurd to speak of this clerk 
as coming into being in a telephone exchange which he has con- 
structed in his own imagination. 

Thus, in spite of his disapproval of metaphysicians, we find 
that Professor Pearson is a metaphysician in precisely the sense of 
the word adopted by himself. He accepts a " beyond" — the sorting- 
machine with its nerves and sense-organs — and makes this " be- 
yond " responsible for the nature of the world of sense-impressions 
and mental constructs. He certainly goes nearer to the supposed 
world outside ourselves "than the brain terminals of the sensory 
nerves," for he distinguishes between brain, nerves, and sense- 
organs, and inclines to divide the credit for the ordering of sense- 
impressions between brain and sense-organs. 

The limitations to our knowledge of the " beyond " are, as he 
lays them down, exceedingly odd. We seem to know a good deal 
about the brain, the nerves, and the sense-organs, but the thing " at 
the other end of the nerve remains unknown and is unknowable." 
Why I should know the brain at whose exchange I am imprisoned, 
why I should know the nerves which run from that brain, and even 
the sense-organs in which they terminate, and then and only then 
come to a wall of ignorance, appears to be a hopeless mystery. 
If I can know a nerve " beyond " sense-impressions to be a nerve, 
why cannot I know a table " beyond " sense-impressions to be a 
table ? 

A knowledge of a world beyond sense-impressions is, therefore, 
asserted by Professor Pearson. It is also denied. Sometimes the 
denial is so decided that we feel a little surprised to find him 
willing to come forward again and reassert it : " Turn the problem 
round and ponder over it as we may, beyond the sense-impression, 
beyond the brain terminals of the sensory nerves, we cannot get. 
Of what is beyond them, of Hhings-in-themselves,' as the meta- 



360 Mind and Matter 

physicians term them, we can know but one characteristic, and 
this we can only describe as a capacity for producing sense-impres- 
sions, for sending messages along the sensory nerves to the brain. 
This is the sole scientific statement which can be made with regard 
to what lies beyond sense-impressions. But even in this state- 
ment we must be careful to analyze our meaning. The methods 
of classification and inference, which hold for sense-impressions 
and for the conceptions based upon them, cannot be projected out- 
side our minds, away from the sphere in which we know them to 
hold, into a sphere which we have recognized as unknown and 
unknowable. The laws, if we can speak of laws, of this sphere 
must be as unknown as its contents, and therefore to talk of its 
contents as producing sense-impressions is an unwarranted infer- 
ence, for we are asserting cause and effect — a law of phenomena 
or sense-impressions — to hold in a region beyond our experience. 
We know ourselves, and we know around us an impenetrable wall 
of sense-impressions. There is no necessity, nay, there is want of 
logic, in the statement that behind sense-impressions there are 
' things-in-themselves ' producing sense-impressions. About this 
supersensuous sphere we may philosophize and dogmatize unprofit- 
ably, but we can never know usefully. It is indeed an unjustifi- 
able extension of the term knowledge to apply it to something 
which cannot be part of the mind's contents." ^ 

Here Professor Pearson has gone almost as far as he could 
go in a denial of our knowledge of a beyond. Nevertheless, he 
has not gone quite as far as consistency ought to compel him 
to go. He takes back, it is true, " the sole scientific statement " 
that we are able to make touching what lies beyond sense-im- 
pression ; but we are impressed by the fact that it seems worth 
while to him, both here and in many other passages in his book, 
to make the statement. This appears to indicate that the state- 
ment is not wholly meaningless to him after all. If it be quite 
without significance, it cannot be a scientific statement, and 
should not be called such. 

In the second place, a careful examination of the passages 
quoted reveals that what is really excluded from knowledge is 
not the whole "beyond." There are, of course, sweeping denials 
that we can get beyond sense-impression at all ; but these are 
neutralized by an argument that evidently makes the only thing 

^ pp. 67, 08. 



The Metaphysics of the ^'Telephone Exchange'" 361 

wholly excluded from knowledge the thing ''at the end of the 
nerve." It is denied that this thing is able to send messages 
"along the sensory nerves to the brain." The existence of the 
nerves and the brain does not appear to be called in question. 

No man would be tempted to commit himself to the "sole 
scientific statement," even as a preliminary step to its demoli- 
tion, if he clearly recognized that the brain and nerves in question 
are not external to the ego at all, but are mere constructs in its 
imagination. That Professor Pearson conceives of them as "be- 
yond " the ego is plain from his statement that the ego cannot get 
beyond the brain-terminals of these same nerves. Thus we find 
the impenetrable wall of sense-impressions by no means im- 
penetrable so far as brain and nerves are concerned. We must 
be able to know at least a part of the "beyond," if we are able to 
know that the ego is at that particular spot in the beyond — is in 
a telephone exchange. But how shall we reconcile this with the 
unequivocal statement that it is "an unjustifiable extension of 
the term knowledge to apply it to something which cannot be 
part of the mind's contents " ? 

No reconciliation is possible. The fact is that Professor 
Pearson from time to time puts his telephone exchange into 
the clerk, but finds it impossible to keep it there. He finds 
it impossible to keep it there for a very good reason. When 
the exchange is put within the clerk, the external world, 
the orderly scheme of things, without which science cannot get 
on, the scheme in which egos have their place, is wholly lost. 
The psychologist busies himself with the contents of individual 
egos^ but even his science compels him to assume an external 
world that is not to be identified with the contents of any one 
of these egos. The student of physical science does not concern 
himself with the contents of egos at all, when he keeps to his 
proper field. 

That Professor Pearson cannot get on without an external 
world — not a projection of mental constructs, but a real ex- 
ternal world — is evident in every chapter of his book. Mark 
the following words: "Does science leave no mystery? On the 
contrary, it proclaims mystery where others profess knowledge. 
There is mystery enough in the universe of sensation and in its 
capacity for containing those little corners of consciousness which 
project their own products, of order and law and reason, into 



362 Mind and Matter 

an unknown and unknowable world." ^ The universe of sensa- 
tion contains these little corners of consciousness — they, the 
egos^ are in it, in some sense of the word. What becomes of this 
scheme of things when we declare that there is no univei'se of 
sensation except in an ego ? 

Let us suppose the man and the dog of the illustration given 
above to take a walk abroad. There is now no "abroad" unless 
it be in the mind of the man or in the mind of the dog. In which 
of these minds shall we conceive them to be walking? Their 
brains are functioning as sorting-machines. They are constructs 
in the mind of the man or in the mind of the dog. How shall 
we set about accounting for the difference in the sense-impres- 
sions of man and of dog? Shall we say that the one construct 
in the mind of the man is to be regarded as the sorting-machine 
which " lets in " itself, the brain of the dog, and everything else 
that is in the universe in the mind of the man ; while the other con- 
struct in the mind of the man " lets in " everything that is in the 
mind of the dog? Shall we say that each walks as a construct 
in his own imagination — walks only "in conception" — and "lets 
in " himself and everything else in his world ? What can we 
mean by the phrase " lets in " when we speak thus ? The illus- 
tration of the man and the dog becomes nonsense unless we are 
willing to stand by the doctrine of the telephone exchange ; and 
if we stand by that doctrine we must not place the telephone ex- 
change in the clerk. 

Those who have some familiarity with the history of reflective 
thought can readily see that Professor Pearson is a metaph3'siciau. 
He does not confine himself to the field of physical science, but he 
tries to give some intelligible account of the mind and of its rela- 
tion to an external world. They can see, moreover, that he takes 
his place among metaphysicians of a sufficiently numerous class — 
those who cut the mind off wholly from an external world, and 
then go on speaking as though the barrier which they have set up 
could be transcended. Those who do this are, of course, inconsist- 
ent, but sometimes the inconsistenc}'' is more or less veiled. With 
Professor Pearson it is naive, frank, and reiterated. He who runs 
may see that the tree is at once up and down — up and down on 
the same page, up and down in the same sentence. Perliaps this 
may be accounted for in part by the fact that Professor Peai-son is 

1 p. 112. 



The Metaphysics of the ''Telephone Exchange'' 363 

a metaphysician par interim^ as Aramis was a mousquetaire, and 
regards the profession as unworthy of him. 

But there is another reason for the palpability of Professor 
Pearson's failure, and one which more nearly concerns us. It is 
that he is a student of physical science — one whose first duty it is 
to give an intelligible account of that external world to which 
one-half of his statements flatly deny an existence. What he is 
compelled to say about this world when he is on his own ground 
— and I for my part have here followed him with pleasure and 
profit — cannot but be in conflict with such statements. 

In his attempt to get on without an external world, and in his 
failure to do so. Professor Pearson does not stand alone. Many 
others have trodden the same path. Were his case precisely like 
that of all other subjective idealists it would not be worth while to 
examine it at such length. What makes it especially interesting 
is, that it shows very clearly that the man of science, above all 
others, must be convicted of inconsistency if he tries to substitute 
for a real material world to which minds may be "parallel," a 
world of mental constructs which has no being except in the indi- 
vidual mind; if he insists on denying to the "universe of sensa- 
tion," which is allowed to have a capacity for containing "little 
corners of consciousness," any existence whatever except in one 
or more of those "little corners." Professor Pearson has been so 
clear and so explicit that he has illustrated this as clearly as any 
one could wish to have it illustrated; and in doing this he has 
been, I think, of no little service. 



CHAPTER XXIII 
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE WORLD AND THE MIND 

From what has been said in Chapter XVII it appears to be 
evident that we cannot conceive of the relation of the mind to the 
external world after the fashion of the interactionist. With the 
best of intentions to be something better, he does not succeed in 
being anything better than a materialist in disguise. One cannot 
attain to canonization merely by assuming a false name and 
appearing in a borrowed halo. The advocatus dlaboU (here the 
analyst) easily makes short work of such pretensions. And it 
appears to be equally clear from the chapters which follow that it 
is impossible to accept quite literally the doctrine of parallelism 
with its absolute and final separation of mind and world. 

We have seen that the doctrine of parallelism is not assumed 
gratuitously. Men do not become parallelists for no reason at all. 
They embrace the doctrine because they think they find in their 
experience facts which justify them in doing so. As we peruse 
Clifford's pages we find him adducing various instances of con- 
comitance which impel him to conceive of the mind and the world 
according to a certain scheme. There are physical facts and there 
are mental facts, and the facts of the two orders are found to be 
related to each other in a given way. The whole argument 
assumes that there are physical facts, and that their concomitance 
with mental facts is matter of observation. In other words, the 
argument assumes that there is, and that there is perceived to be, 
a material world which can be related to and contrasted with a 
mental world. 

On the other hand, we find, when the argument comes to an 
end, the mental facts as a whole quite cut off from the material 
facts. We discover that only mental facts can be given in con- 
sciousness, and that there has been no experience of physical facts 
at all. What we assumed to be physical facts are seen to be, after 
all, only mental facts. We are, thus, shut up to a parallelism of 



The Distinction hetween the World and the Mind 365 

one term, an absurdity. This is the suicide of parallelism, which 
has stabbed itself with the knife of consistency. The same fate 
hangs over the head of every doctrine which rests in the psycho- 
logical standpoint with its inherent inconsistency. It cannot 
afford to grow clear and to draw conclusions with logical rigor. 
To see itself as it is, is to sound its own death-knell and to draw 
the knife from the sheath. 

But why hold to parallelism at all, under the circumstances? 
Why not abandon physical facts to their fate, take in hand the 
single parallel which is left, and construct from that a whole 
world ? 

We have seen the attempt made, in somewhat erratic fashion, 
in the last chapter. When it was found difficult to conceive of 
the telephone exchange as beyond the clerk, it was pulled into the 
clerk, and what was the result? Not a world, an orderly system 
of things, but chaos. Our common experience, which furnishes us 
the basis upon which we must begin all our efforts at metaphysical 
analysis and reconstruction, seems to lay before us an external 
material world and a world of minds related to this in certain 
more or less definite ways. Our consciousness of all of these is 
undoubtedly somewhat vague, but at least we have something 
resembling a system. The illustration of the telephone exchange, 
when it first makes its appearance upon the scene, strikes us as 
pleasing and as not without significance, because it appears to be 
not out of harmony with the system of things as it seems to be 
revealed to us. There are minds, there are material things, the 
minds are somehow brought into relation to each other through 
the material things. Explanation of individual occurrences seems 
possible by means of reference to the system as a whole. But 
once draw the telephone exchange into the clerk, and what is the 
result? We have not even the elements of a world; all our usual 
ways of accounting for things seem to be swept off of the stage at 
one swoop. 

Said Clifford: " Suppose we put a certain man in the middle of 
the hall, and we all looked at him. We should all have percep- 
tions of his brain ; those Avould be facts in our consciousness, but 
they would be all different facts." ^ As we have seen,^ Clifford 
himself ends by drawing the telephone exchange into the clerk. 
Let us try it here. The '-certain man in the middle of the hall " 
1 See Chapter XIX. 2 chapter XXI. 



366 Mind and Matter 

is a man in Clifford's mind and stands in a hall in Clifford's mind. 
Can we all look at him? The words seem to have become 
nonsense. Men in Clifford's mind can look at this other man in 
Clifford's mind. But all these men are in Clifford's mind. What 
reason has he, then, to believe that there are also other men stand- 
ing in other halls and looked at by other men ? 

And if there be, what conceivable relation can there be between 
all these sets of beings in different minds ? We appear to have, 
not a worlds but worlds^ and worlds absolutely disconnected with 
each other. Surely we have travelled far from the common 
experience of the world and of minds, which we set out to make 
more clear to ourselves, when we have substituted for its seeming 
order and unity, this chaotic multiplicity of disconnected images. 
The distinction between mind and world is not made clear — it is 
simply thrown away, and with it the only bond which seems to 
connect in any way minds with each other. Subjective Idealism 
is not a system. It is a witches' Sabbath ; and it is little wonder 
that pious souls like Berkeley feel compelled to call upon God to 
bring order out of chaos by becoming himself a bond of connection 
between things which seem so wholly a law to themselves. 

If, then, we totally renounce the parallelistic scheme and pass 
over to subjective idealism, we simply give up the problem which 
we set out to solve. We do not make less vague the distinction 
between mind and world ; we deny that there is a world, and we 
sweep away all conceivable relations between different minds. The 
last state of a man who philosophizes in this wise is incomparably 
less desirable than the first. In the first he grasped vaguely the 
distinction between the mind and the external world, and that 
between one mind and another. Now he has pulled down the 
whole structure which loomed up before him, and sits disconsolate 
upon its ruins. The best that we can wish him is such a degree 
of blindness that he may not recognize as a ruin the ruin that he 
has made. 

But if we really wish to make clear to ourselves these distinc- 
tions vaguely grasped by the plain man, there seems to be open to 
us only one method of procedure. That one is the restatement of 
the parallelistic doctrine in some such form as to obviate the diffi- 
culties into which that doctrine as ordinarily stated runs out. Such 
a restatement I shall now attempt. I warn the reader tliat there 
is no part of this volume in which there is more danger of my 



The Distinction hetween the World and the Mind 367 

deceiving both him and myself, and I invite him to examine most 
critically every step of my argument. At the same time, it is 
right that I should point out to him that he is not justified in 
adopting uncritically that most questionable of old maxims, falsus 
in uno, falsus in omnibus^ and in rejecting in a body all my analy- 
ses, in case he finds me not wholly successful in this one, and 
decides that he must endeavor to throw light upon the distinction 
between the mind and the world in a fresh analysis undertaken by 
himself. He who would strive to make clear what is but dimly 
grasped in common thought, may very well succeed in part of his 
task, even if he be not successful in accomplishing the task as a 
whole. 

The distinction between his mind and an external world to 
which it is related is, of course, perfectly well recognized by the 
plain man. Here I sit in my study and before my desk. I per- 
ceive the walls, the books, the desk, and distinguish between such 
things as these and my own mind. I do not appear to be con- 
cerned with an uncertain inference, a knowledge at one or more re- 
moves. I seem to be conscious of what is external and conscious 
also of my mind or self as a something contrasted with this. 

Moreover, I recognize not merely the fact that my mind and 
the external world exist, but also the fact that my mind is related 
to a definite portion of the external world as it is not related to 
other portions. I have observed that I see with my eyes, hear 
with my ears, touch with my hands, smell with my nose, taste with 
my mouth, am pained when my body is cut, etc. These things 
are matters of observation : can I not close my eyes, stop my ears, 
take my hands off of my desk, and repeat such operations as often 
as I wish to do so ? Even a baby soon learns that it cannot with 
impunity bite its finger as it is in the habit of biting other things ; 
and the plainest of plain men recognizes that his mind is related to 
his body as it is not related to other material objects. 

Thus, within the experience of the plain man we find a certain 
plan or system. The external world is contrasted with his mind, 
and the two are somewhat vaguely recognized as related in certain 
ways and not in others. There is much that is indefinite in such 
a recognition of the mind and the world. A man may be quite 
unable to define what he means by the external world and most 
uncertain as to the connotation of the word " mind," and yet may feel 
very sure that he is in some way conscious of both. He may feel 



368 Mind and Matter 

equally sure that the body may in some sense be regarded as the 
instrument through which the mind knows things, and yet hesitate 
to hazard even a conjecture as to the nature of the relation of body 
and mind. Whatever may remain dark to him, he cannot, before 
he falls into the hands of the metaphysician, doubt that the desk 
at which he sits is an external thing and a thing to be distinguished 
from his own mind, nor can he doubt that shutting his eyes and 
stopping his ears will make changes in his experience of a quite 
unique description. It is worthy of remark that it does not occur to 
him to gather up the whole of his experience and put it in his mind. 
His mind or consciousness does not mean to him the whole of his 
experience. It is a something in his experience distinguished from 
something else — it is a part or aspect of his experience. If it 
were not this, the distinction between the mind and the world 
could not be recognized by him at all. One term is not enough 
to furnish a contrast. 

The distinctions thus recognized by the plain man science 
develops, as we have seen in earlier chapters of this volume. It 
does not take the material world to be the world of things which 
appear to be intuitively present when the distinction between mind 
and world is drawn in the experience of the plain man. It labori- 
ously builds up a mechanical system and relates individual minds 
to this in more or less definite ways, or, at least, in ways which 
may be called more or less definite when contrasted with the utter 
indefiniteness of common thought. 

It should be kept in mind that science does not, in all this, 
proceed arbitrarily. It insists that it has observed fact upon which 
to rest at every step. It tacitly assumes that the distinction 
between the mind and the world is a distinction within conscious- 
ness, and that the relations of the two are open to scientific investi- 
gation. When the psychologist says "my consciousness," he does 
not mean to include all experience, all existence, real or imaginary. 
He is marking a distinction, and feels that he has abundant reason 
to know that the things which he is distinguishing are given in 
experience. 

In this he is entirely in the right ; but he may, of course, fall 
into error when he attempts to tell what it is that he is thus dis- 
tinguishing. The problem is by no means a simple one. In cer- 
tain of the preceding chapters,^ where the external world and the 
1 Chapters VIII, XV, XVI. 



The Distinction hetiveen the World and the Mind 369 

mind were discussed at some length, such experiences as colors, 
odors, and tastes were recognized as subjective, were gathered up 
and referred to the mind. The objective, external world was 
recognized to be a complex of touch-movement sensations, con- 
trasted with these, and charged with the duty of bringing order 
into our experience as a whole. 

But the reader will have seen that it is impossible to regard 
the distinction between the mind and the external world as iden- 
tical with that between such sensations as taste or smell and 
sensations of touch and movement. He has seen that I have been 
unable to give an account of space and time and of the real world 
in space and time without distinguishing between what is intui- 
tively present in the consciousness of the individual and that for 
which it stands as the symbol, between the appearance and the 
reality which it represents. It is not necessary for us to repudiate 
our former analyses, but it is necessary to complete them by point- 
ing out more explicitly that the very word " sensation " carries with 
it a subjective suggestion of which it is desirable to get rid when 
we are concerned, not with the real world as it appears to this or 
that individual, but with the real world which we contrast with 
our experiences of it.^ 

This becomes more clear to us when we bear in mind that 
psychology, proceeding on the basis proper to it as a natural 
science, feels itself justified in regarding sensations of touch and 
movement as mere copies or representatives in mind of things exter- 
nal. To the psychologist as psychologist it would sound absurd 
to say that things are touch-movement sensations. Things are 
things, and sensations are sensations ; we may observe the relations 
of the two to each other, but we must keep the two classes distinct 
if psychology is to do its work at all. If the psychologist be a 
metaphysician, he will, of course, make an effort to determine with 
some accuracy what he means by " things " ; but it is not his duty 
as a metaphysician to rub out distinctions which he was, as a 
psychologist, justified in drawing. To the metaphysician, as well 

1 In Chapter VI I asked the reader to regard the account of sensation and of the 
external world given in that and in certain chapters following as provisional. In 
those chapters I spoke of the external world as composed of "sensations" or 
*' sensational elements." This chapter will show why such a use of speech is not 
strictly correct ; but I hope it will also show that I have been justified in using the 
words which I have used for lack of some better form of expression. 
2 B 



370 Mind and Matter 

as to the psychologist, sensations must remain sensations, and 
must be distinguishable from "things." 

The science of psychology does not proceed as it does without 
good reason. A study of the body seems to make it plain that 
sensations of all sorts are the result of a message sent along a 
nerve to the brain. If the eye be injured or the optic nerve sev- 
ered, there are no sensations of sight ; if the auditory nerve be 
diseased, it puts a stop to the reception of sensations of hearing ; 
if a tumor presses upon the spinal cord, there are no sensations 
of touch when the foot is brought into contact with objects, or of 
movement when it is swung. Psychology can discover no reason 
for treating differently messages sent along nerves which stretch 
from the finger-tips to the brain, and those sent along nerves 
which extend to the brain from the eye or the ear. If any sensa- 
tion is to be referred to " the telephone exchange," surely every 
sensation is to be so referred — a truth which, as we have seen in 
the last chapter, may lead those who imperfectly comprehend it 
into all sorts of confusions. 

The error into which men fall at this point is a most natural 
one. Sensations of touch and movement seem to be the very stuff 
of which the real material world is composed. Sensations of all 
sorts, including sensations of touch and movement, are discovered 
to be the result of the stimulation of the peripheral end of a sensory 
nerve. The external world, then, cannot really be external, but 
must enjoy a merely fictitious externality. It must be an " inter- 
nal " thing " projected outward." 

It is odd that those who reason thus do not realize that " inner " 
and "outer" have no meaning, and " projection " becomes mere 
incoherence when one has resolved things into sensations and 
rubbed out the distinction between mind and world. It may mean 
something to put sensations into a telephone exchange, and to project 
certain things in imagination beyond the telephone exchange. But 
it cannot mean anything whatever to put all things, including the 
telephone exchange, into the telephone exchange, and then to "pro- 
ject " certain things " out " along wires which are not themselves 
" out." The psychologist has better sense than to make such 
a mistake as this. This is reserved for a metaphysician. The 
psychologist may not clearly comprehend the distinction between 
sensations and things, but he does not lose the distinction. 

He defines a sensation as that which comes into being when a 



The Distinction between the World and the Mind 371 

message conveyed along a sensory nerve reaches certain parts of 
the brain. An occurrence takes place in the world of matter; a 
message starts from the periphery of the body ; it reaches the brain 
appreciably later than the moment at which the occurrence took 
place. He regards the sensation as arising when, and only when, 
the message reaches the brain. The sensation, then, does not 
come into being for some little time after the occurrence has taken 
place. It is palpably absurd to identify the sensation with the 
external occurrence — the one may be past and gone before the 
other has begun to exist. Can the man who has the sensation 
know anything of the occurrence except through his sensation? 
Psychology says no, and at once we seem to be condemned to the 
disheartening inconsistencies of the doctrine of representative per- 
ception, to the hopeless effort to prove that there is a world beyond 
sensations when we are entirely shut up to sensations. 

But, as we have seen all along, the psychologist does not take 
himself quite seriously in making such statements. He believes 
that it is quite possible to prove that a sensation takes place after 
the external occurrence that furnished its stimulus to the periphe- 
ral ending of the sensory nerve. He does not guess at this. He 
holds it to be matter of observation ; and when we inspect his 
batteries, wires, keys, and revolving drums, we convince ourselves 
that it is a matter of scientific observation, and that his knowledge 
of the relations of the external occurrence to the sensation may 
have some approach to accuracy. We see clearly that when he 
says that a man is shut up to his sensations, he really means no 
more than that in a sense he is shut up to his sensations ; and he 
does not mean to put him into such a state of isolation that the 
very word " sensation " becomes meaningless to him. 

Our only problem, therefore, is to determine the sense in which a 
man is shut up to his sensations, and the sense in which he is not. 
In other words, we are to discover what is, at bottom, this psycho- 
logical distinction between sensations and things, the denial of 
which leads to such palpable incoherence. 

Let us begin with the common experience in which the external 
world seems to be revealed, and contrasted with mind, at almost 
every moment. Here I sit at my desk ; I see it ; I lay my hand 
on it. The desk is a real desk and known as part of a real me- 
chanical system of things. I shut my eyes, I take my hand away. 
Never for a moment, unless I have been misled by the speculations 



372 Mind and Matter 

of some philosopher, does it occur to me to think that the desk 
has been annihihited. For the time being the desk has disap- 
peared, it is no longer pereeived. 

The distinction is an extremely important one, and marks the 
fact that the elements of experience may take their place in two 
very different constructs, which, however, be it remarked, are by 
no means independent of each other. Of the nature of the con- 
struct which we call the external world I have treated at length in 
chapters preceding. We have seen that there is there no distinction 
of consciousness-elements as dim and vivid, as imaginary and sensa- 
tional. All this is abstracted from when we are concerned with 
what is material. Yet such distinctions undoubtedly occur within 
our experience, and their significance must not be overlooked. 
They belong as a class to what has been called the subjective 
order of things as contrasted with the objective. What is this 
subjective order? 

In the experience above referred to, even a child can recognize 
the significance of the changes which take place in my body. 
Whether the e3"es are open or shut, or the hand is on or off of the 
desk, makes all the difference in the world to the subjective order. 
The urchin who alternately stops and unstops his ears to make the 
preacher sing an unearthly tune, never supposes that he is inter- 
fering with the actual delivery of the sermon. He knows that he 
is playing with one of his senses, that he is changing the subjective 
order, not the objective. The two may sometimes be confused, as 
when a young child shuts its own eyes to prevent other persons 
from seeing it ; but, in general, the distinction is one pretty clearly 
recognized even by the least reflective. 

And to one who reflects a little it becomes evident that the 
whole of the subjective order is intimately bound up with the 
changes which take place in his body. Receding from a tree 
makes it seem small and blue ; we do not think that the tree has 
changed, but we realize that the impression made upon our body 
is not what it was before, and thus we account for the change 
in our experience. Tlie longer we hold a weight, the heavier it 
grows, but we do not think that the weight has changed ; we say 
that our muscles and nerves are feeling the strain. Every sub- 
jective change, if it is to find an explanation at all, must find its 
explanation in the objective material system of things, upon the 
shoulders of which is laid, as we have seen, the duty of ordering 



The Distinction between the World and the Mind 373 

our experience as a whole. There are a raultitude of subjective 
changes which cannot as yet be so accounted for, but that only 
means that the ordering of experience is incomplete, or, in other 
words, that we are ignorant. 

The fact that the subjective order is bound up with the body 
and the changes which take place in it is, then, recognized by the 
plain man. To him it is one thing to say, " The tree exists," and 
another to say, " I see the tree " ; it is one thing to say, " The 
water is hot," and another to say, " I feel heat." He is not thrown 
into confusion by observing that the water may feel hot to one 
hand and cold to another, for he has learned to draw the perfectly 
justifiable distinction between qualities of things and sensations. 
He recognizes the two orders to be two, if not explicitly in all 
cases, at least implicitly, and he can make good use of the dis- 
tinction. And what he does instinctively, and in a somewhat 
blundering way, the psychologist does more thoroughly and ac- 
curately. He makes it his duty to investigate the subjective 
order, and to determine more narrowly the relations between 
phenomena which, as belonging to it, are recognized as mental, 
and the bodily changes through which such phenomena are related 
to the world of matter. 

But, it may be objected, what has all this discussion of the 
subjective order and the objective order to do with extricating 
the psychologist from the trap in which he appears to have placed 
himself? Here I sit before my desk and look at it. The psychol- 
ogist tells me that the desk is one thing, and the sensations I 
derive from it another. Of which am I conscious ? What is the 
desk which I seem to see ? Is it external f Then what are the 
sensations ? I do not seem to myself to be conscious of my sensa- 
tions as a something given in addition to the desk ; as a copy 
given side by side with the original. To admit the existence of 
such copies in consciousness side by side with the original would 
contradict some of the fundamental doctrines of the psychologist. 
Is, then, this desk sensation^ or, to speak more accurately, is it 
percept? Is it internal? Then how is it possible for me to know 
that it is in any way related to a desk truly external ? How can 
I know, in other words, that it is sensation or percept? The dif- 
ficulty seems to be that, in the initial experience which furnishes 
the ultimate foundation for all that I can say about sensations 
and things, but one thing appears to present itself, i.e. this desk, 



374 Mind and Matter 

and this one thing the psychologist, following the lead of the 
plain man, asks me to separate into two things, — an original and 
a copy, — and to relegate them to different worlds. 

If, however, we scrutinize more carefully the experience in 
question, we shall find abundant justification for the distinctions 
drawn by the psychologist, and shall find, moreover, that the dis- 
tinction of the subjective and the objective order has everything 
to do with the solution of the problem. In the chapters which 
treat of the external world I have pointed out at length that a 
group of consciousness-elements must be recognized as having ite 
place in a certain orderly system before we can regard it as con- 
stituting a real thing. Considered in itself and abstracted from 
all relation to other experiences, it is just what it is, i.e. such and 
such a group of elements ; but it is not a material thing, and is 
not a part of the external world. And the most cursory glance 
at our treatises on psychology, or, for that matter, a little reflec- 
tion upon what the word " sensation " means even to the plain man, 
will reveal that, for an experience to be recognized as a sensation, 
it must be referred to the subjective order, it must be distinguished 
from what has its place in the external world, and must be related 
in a peculiar way to a certain organized body. The isolated bit 
of experience — if such a thing may be called a bit of experience 
— is neither a sensation nor a thing. 

With this in mind let us examine the experience to which 
we must all come back if we are to have ground of any sort under 
our feet. I have said that one thing appears to present itself, i.e. 
the desk, and have asked whether this is to be taken as thing or 
as sensation. But it ought to be evident that there is an ambigu- 
ity in the very question. In itself considered^ this bit of expe- 
rience cannot be either thing or sensation. 

It is not given as either, if by the use of the word " given " we 
mean to exclude its reference to a greater complex. It is given 
as both, if we mean that it can be referred to, and can take its 
place in, both orders, the subjective and the objective. As a 
matter of fact, the experience always takes its place in the one 
connection or the other, except perhaps at the very beginning of 
conscious life, or at the moment of abstraction when the philoso- 
pher is striving to distinguish clearly between what a thing is in 
itself and what it is in this or that relation to other things. 

And it should not be overlooked that tlie experience takes its 



The Distinction hetiveen the World and the Mind 375 

place more readily and naturally in the objective order than in 
the subjective. This is a commonplace of psychology, and is 
recognized by us all in the accepted statement that children, and, 
indeed, most men, pay much more attention to what takes 
place in the external world than they do to the phenomena of 
their own minds. The desk is the desk to the child, i.e. it is a 
part of the same system of things with the rest of the furniture 
of the room and with his body long before it is consciously viewed 
as sensation. This does not mean that the subjective order is not 
recognized by the child implicitly. It only means that it stands 
out with less clearness than the other, and that any experience 
which can form part of the objective order is more apt to present 
itself in that connection than in the other. 

This is true of grown men, as well as of children. When, 
therefore, I ask myself: Is the one thing here before me the ex- 
ternal desk or the sensation ? it is highly probable that the expe- 
rience has already taken its place in the objective order. The 
words " here before me " seem to be enough to indicate that it has 
done so. And if this be so, it is absurd to ask whether the ex- 
perience be " thing " or " sensation." The desk is a thing, and it 
cannot be a sensation. 

This, then, is not the sensation. But where is the sensation ? 
Psychology refers it to the brain, and seems to give it a place, in 
some sense of the word, other than the place of the external 
object. I have already indicated that, when the external thing is 
a momentary occurrence, the sensation assumed to represent it is 
assigned a time different from that of the occurrence itself. In 
the next chapter I shall investigate more narrowly what is meant 
by assigning to sensations a time and a place ; but it is enough 
here to point out that both the plain man and the psychologist 
treat sensations somewhat after the analogy of material things. 

If, then, I think of something external as belonging to a given 
time and place, and, following the example which has been set for 
me, think of the corresponding sensation as belonging to another 
time and place, it is natural that I should be puzzled when I ask 
myself how, out of the one experience which I seem to have as I 
look at my desk, I shall extract the dual existence of thing and 
sensation. I am apt to look for the sensation in the same objec- 
tive order as the thing, and to look for it in another part of the 
same order — to seek to find outside of the body and in the brain 



376 Mind and Matter 

the original and the copy. But no such thing is to be found in 
experience. No man is conscious of the photograph of a desk and 
the desk itself. To pass from thing to sensation we must leave 
the objective order and turn to the subjective order, and it is not 
easy to do this in a wholly satisfactory fashion, for we all have a 
tendency to conceive things subjective after a material analogy. 

That they are so conceived by the interactionist was made plain 
in the chapter on " The Atomic Self," and it there became evident 
that the material analogy of which he makes use quite obscures 
for him the distinction of the mental and the material. That they 
are so conceived by the parallelist was shown in the chapters on 
" Parallelism " ; but it becomes evident, I hope, that the parallelistic 
doctrine, while it seems to conceive of a man's mind as related to 
his head much as a saint's halo is related to his crown, and while, 
when it tries to grow metaphysical, it falls back upon material 
analogies to explain the constancy of this relation, nevertheless is 
greatly to be preferred to the doctrine of the interactionist. For 
one thing, it does not declare defective the wonderful mechanism 
of the external world ; and, for another, it denies that sensations 
are to be found in the same world with things, which means that 
it does not confound the objective and the subjective orders of 
experience. 

Now there is no objection to our making use of material 
analogies in conceiving things mental. That we should make use 
of them to some degree seems unavoidable. It is, however, in the 
highest degree important that we should not be misled into taking 
them too seriously. It is most convenient to represent diagram- 
matically the mind and the world under the figure suggested by 
the parallelist, but it is well to remember that this is only a figure, 
and must not be accepted literally. We must keep ourselves 
mindful of the fact that the parallelist insists that the objec- 
tive and the subjective really belong to different worlds and must 
not be placed literally side-by-side. If we forget this aspect of his 
doctrine, we do him a grave injustice. 

If, then, we cast in our lot with the parallelist, — and if we are 
wise, we will do this, — not forgetting to make due allowance for 
the diagrammatic character of the figure employed by him, we will 
not expect to find in any intuitive experience the original and the 
copy for which men are so apt to look. We shall understand that 
by the original, the external thing, is meant an experienced con- 



i 



The Distinction hetiveen the World and the Mind 377 

tent recognized as having its place in the objective order, as 
forming part of the material world ; while by the copy, the repre- 
sentative, the sensation, is meant this content recognized as having 
its place in the subjective order, as related to the changes which 
take place in the bod}^ 

Shall we, then, say that the one experience is both material 
thing and sensation, the one in the one connection, and the other 
in the other ? It is a fair question to ask whether, and in what 
sense, the experience may be called one, when one is speaking 
thus. The thing is certainly not the sensation; they may perfectly 
well be distinguished and kept apart. We can conceive of the 
thing as existing when the sensation no longer exists — when the 
human body, through which, as we say, the thing has become 
known, has been destroyed. Every man who makes his will draws 
this distinction between the existence of the thing and the exist- 
ence of the sensation. He knows perfectly well that it is one 
thing for the world to go on existing, and another for him to know 
it, which only means that he can distinguish between the objective 
order and the subjective, and that he does not confuse the one 
construct with the other. 

Thus it seems sufficiently plain that the parallelist, in insisting 
upon the complete separation of sensations and things, has laid 
hold of a truth. In forgetting that he is employing a figure some- 
what loosely, he is betrayed into speaking in such a way that he 
set us wondering how an external world can be known at all. 
But, when we understand him, we can approve his position, and 
we can moreover justify the psychologist in maintaining that we 
can know no more of the external world than is revealed to us 
through our sensations. 

Every element of experience may take its place in the subjec- 
tive order, i.e. may be regarded as sensation. Even that which I, 
at one moment of my experience, regard as objective, may at the 
next moment be contrasted as subjective with another objective. 
In the chapters on " Appearance and Reality," we have seen how the 
external world is pushed farther and farther off, so to speak, by suc- 
cessive acts of reflection. The psychologist's affirmation that the 
external world can be known to us only through sensation is the 
recognition of this truth, that there is no experience that cannot 
conceivably be regarded as having its place in the subjective 
order. Even the external world of which science speaks, the 



378 Mind and Matter 

imperceptible world of ether, atoms, and molecules, may be 
regarded as the highest ideal which the human mind has as yet suc- 
ceeded in building up, as our nearest approximation to the truth, 
and may be contrasted with the real world as it is. Of course, 
when we thus think it, we are not thinking of it as the real world : 
we are thinking of it merely as our thought of the real world, and 
there is present the psychological suggestion which is always 
present when we contrast thing and sensation. 

One may pass from the objective order to the subjective at any 
moment, and whatever be the experience with which we are con- 
cerned. There is, thus, a sense in which we can say that our 
knowledge of things cannot extend beyond what is given in sensa- 
tion ; but it must be apparent to the discriminating reader that if 
it were impossible to pass as well from the subjective order to the 
objective, the above statement would be meaningless, for no 
significance would attach to the expression "our knowledge of 
things." 

I suppose there are few who have interested themselves in the 
history of philosophy who are not acquainted with Sir William 
Hamilton's chapters on the " Relativity of Knowledge." It will be 
remembered that Sir William compares ^ external existence to a 
polygon with a multitude of facets, only a few of which are turned 
toward us. He points out that our avenues of sense are few, and 
argfues that we have no reason to limit the modes of existence to 
the extremely small number revealed to us through our organs of 
sense. He quotes with approval Voltaire's parable, in which the 
inhabitants of one of the planets of the dog-star are allowed a 
thousand senses, and yet complain that the number is too limited. 
The moral of the whole discussion is that, had we still other organs 
of sense we should see the world in new guises, and should enjoy 
a richer and more varied experience than that which we enjoy at 
present. 

It is not necessary to accept Sir William's theory of knowledge 
in order to see the significance of the truth that he is here endeav- 
oring to express. It has been a thought common to many minds, 
that, were our organs of sense different, our sensations would be 
different; and were our sensations different, the world revealed in 
our experience would not be what it is. One can hold this per- 
fectly well without taking literally the diagrammatic scheme of 
1 "Lectures on Metaphysics," VIII. 



The Distinction between the World and the Mind 379 

original and copy. The recognition of the subjective order, the 
recognition of sensations as sensations, is the recognition of our 
experiences as related to bodily changes. We press upon one eye, 
external things seem to be doubled ; we suffer from an indigestion, 
what we before recognized as sweet has become bitter and unpala- 
table. We perceive in the world many organized bodies more or 
less nearly resembling our own, and we make allowance for these 
differences, attributing to the various creatures more or less differ- 
ent sensations. 

And, as it is possible to refer every experience to the subjec- 
tive order, treating it as sensation, it is quite possible for the 
man who has reflected upon such facts as these, to conclude that 
those elements of his experience which, when referred to the sub- 
jective order, he calls touch-movement sensations, and which, 
when referred to the objective, form the very stuff of which the 
external world is made, may not, in the experience of some creature, 
play the r61e that they play in his own. In other words, he may 
conceive of an external world revealed to some other creature — 
perhaps to himself under changed circumstances — not in touch- 
movement sensations, but in experiences of some other sort. It is 
not absurd to speak of such possibilities, and they readily suggest 
themselves to the psychologist with a speculative turn of mind. 

It should be remarked, however, that the man who says, "If 
our human brains and sense-organs were different, we should per- 
ceive a different world," has no right to deny that our experience, 
such as it is, is a revelation of truth. If there is to be any truth 
in his conclusion, there must be truth in the premises from which 
it is deduced ; that is to say, he remains in the one system of 
experiences throughout, merely passing from one construction to 
another, and he has no reason to believe himself at any point 
the dupe of " mere appearance," or to assume the existence of a 
"beyond," which forms no part of the system. 

It is, then, perfectly legitimate to speculate touching the possi- 
ble existence of new senses, new sensations, new modes in which 
the external world may conceivably be revealed. It is only neces- 
sary to bear in mind that we are everywhere concerned with the 
subjective order and the objective order of experience, and with con- 
structions therein. An "unknowable," a " thing-in-itself " has 
evidently no part to play in the whole process. One can draw 
every distinction which it is necessary to draw without ever refer- 



380 Mind and Matter 

ring to such a thing. Its assumption is due to an imperfect appre- 
hension of what is meant by the distinction of subjective and 
objective. Wherever such an assumption may be found, it betrays 
at least a trace of the tendency so evident in the plain man and 
even in the psychologist to take too literally the material analogy 
by which we make comprehensible to ourselves the distinction of 
mind and world. 

We can see, thus, that much may be said for the psychological 
standpoint which has been so often discussed in the chaptei-s pre- 
ceding. Its very inconsistency is its salvation, for it is perfectly 
true that, in a sense, the mind is cut off from the external world, 
and that, in a sense, it is not. The distinction between the sub- 
jective order and the objective order of experience must be drawn, 
and must not be obliterated. 

The fact that it is extremely difficult to draw it clearly, and to 
avoid passing unconsciously from the one order to the other, is 
borne in upon us when we turn to what certain writers, commonl}^ 
regarded as very clear and straightforward, have had to say upon 
the subject. I have already had occasion to point out ^ that John 
Stuart Mill, in defining material things as " permanent possibilities 
of sensation," passes from the objective order to the subjective, 
and introduces a psychological suggestion from which the notion 
of external things should be freed. When we examine his account 
of what is meant by the mind, we discover evidences of the same 
imperfect apprehension of what constitutes the two orders of expe- 
rience. He writes: 2 — 

" The permanent possibility of feeling, which forms my notion 
of myself, is distinguished by important differences from the per- 
manent possibilities of sensation which form my notion of what I 
call external objects. In the first place, each of these last repre- 
sents a small and perfectly definite part of the series, which, in its 
entireness, forms my conscious existence — a single group of pos- 
sible sensations, which experience tells me I might expect to have 
under certain conditions ; as distinguished from mere vague and 
indefinite possibilities, w^hich are considered such only because they 
are not known to be impossibilities. My notion of myself, on the 
contrary, includes all possibilities of sensation, definite or indefi- 
nite, certified by experience or not, which I may imagine inserted 

1 Chapter VII. 

2 " Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy," Vol. 2, Chapter XII. 



The Distinction hetween the World and the Mind 381 

in the series of my actual and conscious states. In the second 
place, the permanent possibilities which I call outward objects, 
are possibilities of sensation only, while the series which I call 
myself includes, along with and as called up by these, thoughts, 
emotions, and volitions, and permanent possibilities of such. 
Besides that these states of mind are, to our consciousness, ge- 
nerically distinct from the sensations of our outward senses, they 
are further distinguished from them by not occurring in groups, 
consisting of separate elements which coexist, or may be made to 
coexist, with one another. Lastly (and this difference is the most 
important of all), the possibilities of sensation, which are called 
outward objects, are possibilities of it to other beings as well as 
to me ; but the particular series of feelings which constitute my 
own life is confined to myself, no other sentient being shares it 
with me." 

In the above extract, Mill does not attempt to give a detailed 
description of the contents of a mind or self, and even if he did so 
it would not be worth while for me to criticise it at length here. 
Psychology has made strides since his day, and it is possible to draw 
up now a better inventory of the furniture of a mind than it was 
not many yeai"S since. It is, of course, quite true that we think 
of minds as containing much besides sensations, though I have not 
dwelt upon this in the present chapter, as I have found it conven- 
ient to defer for the present the consideration of any other element 
than sensation. I merely wish to draw attention to the fact that 
Mill does not make the distinction between the subjective order 
and the objective order a very clear one, for he appears to make 
the objective order a part of the subjective. 

It will not do to say that an external object represents " a small 
and perfectly definite part of the series which, in its entireness, 
forms my conscious existence," while the self includes the whole 
series. As we have seen, an external object is not, as exter- 
nal object, a group of sensations w^hether actual or possible, 
and must not, as external, be made part of a mind. What is 
meant by the statement that external objects are shared with 
me by other beings will be investigated later, but there is 
certainly a sense in which we may say that two men per- 
ceive the same tree. It is as certainly nonsense to say that two 
men share the same sensation. The difficulty in which Mill has 
entangled himself comes clearly to the surface in his concluding 



382 Mind and Matter 

sentence. If " the particular series of feelings which constitutes 
my own life, is confined to myself," and if, as we have seen, my 
notion of myself includes all possibilities of sensation whatever, 
it is difficult to see what there is left to share with another after 
we have made external objects a small and definite part of the all- 
inclusive group of experiences that cannot be shared. 

It is easy to see what Mill is trying to say in this extract. It 
is also easy to see that he has not succeeded in saying it in such a 
way as to avoid inconsistency. It is not without significance that 
in this attempt to distinguish between the mental and the physical, 
he passes over in silence the reference of sensations to the body, the 
contrasting of sensation with what is not sensation. Every man 
who turns things into sensations must lose the real distinction 
between the mind and the world. In apprehending one truth — 
the truth that there is no experience which may not be referred to 
the subjective order — he has lost sight of another, namely, the 
truth that sensations are not things, nor things sensations, and that 
they must not be talked about in the same way. 

The same confusion is clearly traceable in the writings of Pro- 
fessor Clifford, who, in his essay " On the Nature of Things-in- 
themselves," expresses himself as follows : — 

" My feelings arrange and order themselves in two distinct ways. 
There is the internal or subjective order, in which sorrow succeeds 
the hearing of bad news, or the abstraction 'dog' symbolizes the 
perception of many different dogs. And there is the external or 
objective order, in which the sensation of letting go is followed by 
the sight of a falling object and the sound of its fall. The objec- 
tive order, qud order, is treated by physical science, which investi- 
gates the uniform relations of objects in time and space. Here the 
word ' object ' (or ' phenomenon ') is taken merely to mean a group 
of my feelings, which persists as a group in a certain manner; for I 
am at present considering only the objective order of my feelings. 
The object, then, is a set of changes in my consciousness, and not 
anything out of it. Here is as yet no metaphysical doctrine, but 
only a fixing of the meaning of a word. We may subsequently 
find reason to infer that there is something which is not object, but 
which corresponds in a certain way with the object ; this will be a 
metaphysical doctrine, and neither it nor its denial is involved in 
the present determination of meaning. But the determination 
must be taken as extending to all those inferences which are made 



The Distinction between the World and the Mind 383 

by science in the objective order. If I hold that there is hydrogen 
in the sun, I mean that if I could get some of it in a bottle, and 
explode it with half its volume of oxygen, I should get that group 
of possible sensations which we call 'water.' The inferences of 
physical science are all inferences of my real or possible feelings ; 
inferences of something actually or potentially in my consciousness, 
not of anything outside of it." 

The confusion of subjective and objective is here so plain that 
it appears scarcely necessary to comment upon it. Objects in time 
and space are made groups of my feelings ; that is to say, they are 
placed in the subjective order, and are treated as sensations, not 
as external things. With groups of my feelings physical science 
is not concerned. The science which occupies itself with them is 
psychology, and that science does not mistake them for external 
things at all. Nor can one fall into a more serious misapprehension 
than to suppose that the inferences of physical science are " infer- 
ences of something actually or potentially in my consciousness," 
for the words " my consciousness " imply an unmistakable refer- 
ence to the subjective order ; " my consciousness " is nothing other 
than the sum total of "mj^ feelings." When the objective order is 
thus absorbed into the subjective, the telephone exchange has been 
drawn into the clerk, and the perplexities of the man who looks at 
the candlestick have begun. 

A little reflection shows, moreover, that it will not do to make 
everything sensation and then secure for ourselves the mere sem- 
blance of an external world by the " projection outside " of what 
is really "inside." Professor Pearson has abundantly illustrated 
the futility of this attempt in his picture of the unhappy clerk who 
must at once contain his exchange and be contained by it. We 
can see now that his difficulty arises from the fact that, like Mill 
and Clifford, he makes the subjective order all-inclusive, and yet 
endeavors to retain an objective order of some sort as a part of the 
former. It results from this that the external object must be at 
once sensation and external object, subjective and not subjective. 
This contradictory r61e it is, of course, impossible for it to play. 
In so far as it is sensation, it cannot be thing ; and in so far as it is 
thing, it cannot be sensation. 

The rather common tendency to grant a certain chronological 
or logical priority to sensations, and to conceive the external world 
to be constructed out of them, seems to be due in part to what has 



384 Mind and Matter 

been so happily called the psychologist's fallacy. We speak of an 
infant as having sensations before the complex called its percep- 
tion of an external world has as yet been built up in its experience. 
What we call its sensations are very properly called such,/rom our 
point of view. We distinguish between its sensations and its body, 
and relate its sensations to its body in certain rather definite ways. 
In other words, we refer the experiences in question to the subjec- 
tive order, and it is because we do this that we call them sensa- 
tions. But from the point of view of the infant^ if it can be said to 
have a point of view, the experiences are not sensations, for they 
are not supposed to be referred to any order at all. When experi- 
ences come to be regarded as " inner," it means that the two orders, 
inner and outer, have come to be distinguished, however dimly. 
It is not more sensible to say that sensations are chronologically or 
logically prior to things, than it is to say that the inside of a hat is 
chronologically or logically prior to the outside. 



CHAPTER XXIV 
THE TIME AND PLACE OF SENSATIONS AND IDEAS 

Thus we see that sensations, in order to be sensations, must not 
be isolated shreds of experience, but must stand in a certain con- 
text. They must be contrasted with and related to a world of 
material things ; and more especially must they be related to that 
most important of material things, the body. 

This doctrine is entirely in harmony with the somewhat vague 
deliverances of common thought. Every one who comes to distin- 
guish between sensations and things refers sensations in some way 
to the body. By the unreflective this reference is most naturally 
and easily accomplished by treating sensations very much as though 
they were material things of a somewhat peculiar order, and by 
putting them in the body in a material sense. As we have seen, 
this materializing tendency on the part of the plain man is raised 
to the rank of a philosophical position in the ancient and still 
popular doctrine of the atomic self, the doctrine of the interaction- 
ist. He who would place the self literally in the body, or set sen- 
sations to simmering " in the same vat " with brain motions, has 
fallen into an error which is the direct opposite of the one com- 
mented upon at the close of the last chapter. We there saw that 
certain philosophers have been misled into obliterating the distinc- 
tion between the objective order and the subjective order by declar- 
ing external things to be sensations. Here the same distinction is 
obliterated by giving what is subjective a place in the objective 
order. 

Perhaps I would better say the distinction is obscured, for it is 
never wholly obliterated. The interactionist does not, as we have 
seen, turn sensations, ideas of " selves," into purely material things, 
for he cannot wholly overlook the fact that such things have their 
place in the subjective order. He makes them vaguely and incon- 
sistently material. But whatever the degree of his vagueness and 
inconsistency, he holds tenaciously, as he should, to the bodily 

2 c 885 



386 Mind and Matter 

reference which cannot be overlooked if any experience is to be 
regarded as belonging to the subjective order. 

It is interesting to remark that those who explicitly resolve ex- 
ternal things into sensations are as unable to dispense with this bodily 
reference as is any one else. It is true that in the extract quoted in 
the last chapter, Mill attempts to distinguish between the mind and 
the world without referring to the body at all. But it is also true 
that, immediately afterward, when he is stating the argument for 
the existence of other minds, he at once takes up what he has over- 
looked before, and founds his argument upon it. Clifford, when 
he has turned " objects in time and space " into groups of '' my 
feelings," seems to have made impossible any relation between my 
feelings as a whole and any external object whatever ; and yet, in 
his argument for parallelism, we not only find him referring mental 
facts to the body, but specifying to what particular part of the 
body they are to be referred : " the mental fact is somewhere or 
other in the region RCCB of the diagram, and does not include 
the two ends." ^ And as for Professor Pearson, he keeps putting 
sensations "at the brain-terminals of the sensory nerves," even 
when nerves and brain have been themselves declared " inside " 
and are looking around in vain for a terminal at which to place 
themselves. 

Psychology and cerebral physiology, of course, emphasize the 
bodily reference of sensations. In the existing state of our knowl- 
edge the psychologist and the physiologist are not forced to declare 
themselves either for interaction or for parallelism. They may do 
good work in their respective fields without trying to make very 
clear what they mean by " localization," or just how they are to 
conceive of mind and matter as related. But that mental phe- 
nomena are related to the changes which take place in the body, 
and that it is their duty to discover as many such relations as 
possible, and to substitute, where they can, accurate and definite 
information for the vague knowledge of the plain man, they seem 
generally to assume as self-evident. In some sense of the words, 
they assign to sensations, as does the plain man, their time and 
place of being. If we refuse to follow them in this, we seem to 
repudiate outright a mass of material that has been heaped together 
by certain sciences, which are, it is true, highly incomplete, but 
which we surely cannot regard as speaking without some authority. 

1 See Chapter XIX. 



The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas 387 

Philosophers of many schools have been at one in allowing to 
what have sometimes been called the phenomena of the internal 
sense an existence in time. That a sensation may come into being 
at this moment rather than at that men have not been tempted to 
dispute. But a venerable tradition has denied to mental phenomena 
an existence in space, or at any rate such an unequivocal existence 
in space as is enjoyed by material things. The ubiquitous " tota 
in toto " soul of Plotinus and of the Schoolmen is, as we have seen,i 
in the body in a very dubious sense of the word. Descartes, to 
whom the presence of the soul in the little pineal gland was as the 
presence of the engineer in the cab of his locomotive, was yet 
unwilling to declare himself for a definite and unambiguous locali- 
zation. The echo of this ancient tradition, as we find it in the 
mind of the plain man to-day, unmistakably shows a disinclination 
to attribute to mental phenomena space-relations proper, notwith- 
standing the strong tendency to conceive of things mental after 
the analogy of things material. Men generally object to saying 
that sensations and ideas are extended and occupy space, and the 
psychologist shares the general objection. 

We appear, thus, to be confronted with conflicting tendencies. 
On the one hand, there is the impulse to give to mental phenomena 
a definite place in the system of things as a whole by assigning to 
them their moment of time and their location in space ; on the 
other, there is the feeling that location in space, at least, cannot 
be frankly granted them. This conflict of tendencies usually 
results in much indefiniteness touching the nature of mental phe- 
nomena and the manner of their existence. It seems possible to 
do away with this vagueness, in part, at least, by determining 
more precisely in what sense it is permissible to assign to mental 
phenomena a time and place. 

Let us suppose a plain man to be watching from a distance a 
laborer striking blows with his sledge upon the track of a railroad. 
He hears the sound when he sees the hammer in the air, not when he 
sees it touch the track. But he does not refer the sensation to the 
upward stroke, for he allows for the time it takes the sound, as he 
expresses it, to reach his ear. In other words, he distinguishes 
between the time of some occurrence in the external world and 
the time of his sensation, fixing the latter at the instant at which 
some impression is made upon his body. Such experiences as the 

1 Chapter XVII. 



388 Mind and Matter 

above make it quite comprehensible to him, when he has once 
been informed of the fact, that he might continue to see the 
sun for some time after the complete annihilation of that body. 
He has only to think that, as the sound reached his ear later 
than the blow to which he referred it, so the light will travel 
toward his eye even when the blaze which gave it birth has been 
extinguished. 

With this distinction between the time of some external occur- 
rence and the time of the sensation referred to it, the psychologist 
has no quarrel save on the score of lack of accuracy. To say that 
one hears a sound when a certain disturbance in the air reaches 
the ear, or that one has a sensation of sight when light reaches 
the eye, is, he thinks, loose and inexact. His endeavor is to fix 
more definitely the time at which sensations come into being. 

He introduces me to a rather simple bit of mechanism so con- 
structed as to let fall a shutter and to record the exact moment of 
its fall. I place my finger upon a key, pressure upon which is to 
record the moment at which I perceive the shutter to fall. 
When I have made the movement and read off the result, I 
discover a discrepancy between the record I have made and the 
automatic record made by the machine. I say that an appreciable 
time has elapsed between the actual fall of the shutter and the 
emergence in my consciousness of the visual sensation. 

I cannot account for the discrepancy by saying that the time 
was lost in the passage of the rays of light from the falling shutter 
to my eye. The motion of light-waves is so inconceivably rapid 
that the time lost thus is inappreciable. As a result of his re- 
searches, the psychologist is ready to describe the moments which 
have elapsed, as the time taken by the passage of a certain impulse 
through the body, from eye to brain, and from brain to finger. 
He even divides up somewhat roughly the whole interval, distin- 
guishing between time taken up by the disturbance in the sense- 
organ, by the journey of the message along the sensory nerve to 
the brain, by the passage through the brain, by the journey of the 
message along the motor nerve, and by the contraction of the 
muscles. These subdivisions of the whole interval he is by no 
means in a position to measure accurately; but the mere recog- 
nition of their existence is enough to prevent him from accept- 
ing the time of the record I have made as the true time of 
the sensation. The time of my sensation is somewliere between 



The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas 389 

the two times recorded, and the psychologist assumes — not with- 
out reason — that the true time is that at which the message 
passed through the brain or some part of the brain. 

In the present state of cerebral physiology it is useless to ask 
precisely what part ; no man is in a position to say exactly what 
disturbance in the brain is to be assumed to be connected most 
intimately with this or that sensation. The parallelist may speak 
-enthusiastically of a "point for point" correspondence, but he 
should admit that in speaking thus he is describing an as yet 
unattained ideal, and is not giving an accurate account of what is 
definitely known. He cannot relate given mental phenomena to 
given molecular motions in the brain, for we really know nothing 
of such molecular motions. Even that vaguer localization which 
would fix the time of the emergence of a sensation at the moment 
when a particular region of the brain is thrown into agitation is a 
matter of much dispute. It is impossible to say how much of the 
brain must be concerned in the disturbance with which we connect 
any mental fact. 

But, admitting all this, no reasonable man will affirm that the 
labors of the psychologist and physiologist have been in vain. The 
vague reference of sensations to the body, which we find in common 
thought, has been made more explicit. The time of the sensations 
has been fixed within narrower limits, and it is conceivable that, 
with the growth of human knowledge, it may come to be fixed 
within much narrower limits still. We may some day discover to 
just what cerebral disturbance a given mental fact is to be referred, 
and we may determine with exactitude the time of the beginning 
and the end of this disturbance. 

It may be objected that, in doing this, one is, after all, deter- 
mining only the time of certain occurrences in the material world, 
and not fixing the time of the sensation itself. But what else 
than this can it mean to determine the time of a sensation ? The 
time which we seek is evidently real time. There is but one real 
time. The real time of an occurrence means the point, in the 
-series of changes which constitute the life-history of the real world, 
at which the occurrence takes place. The sensation, as sensation^ 
cannot be assigned a place in this series of changes. When we 
speak of its time — its real time — we can only mean the time of 
that material change to which we relate the sensation as the plain 
man relates his sensations to his body. It is this that we endeavor 



390 Mind and Matter 

to determine in psychological investigations, as becomes clear when 
we study the actual procedure of the psychologist. 

That we are concerned with real time, the time of the external 
world, becomes the more apparent when we call to mind the dis- 
tinction drawn by plain man and psychologist alike, between real 
time and apparent. The weary occupant of the pew knows that 
the tiresome sermon only seems long ; the experimenter with nar- 
cotics knows that whole ages may seem to pass in what is really 
a brief interval ; such words as pastime^ passetemps, Zeitvertreib^ 
hold the distinction in a state of crystallization, and embody the uni- 
versal experience that certain hours are, subjectively considered, 
much longer than others. No schoolboy supposes that the clock 
loiters in the morning and makes up for its laziness in the after- 
noon, when he is on the playground. Real time and apparent 
time are recognized by every one, and sometimes the psychologist 
occupies himself with the one and sometimes with the other ; but 
when it is a question of the moment at which a sensation comes 
into being, or of the actual duration of a sensation, what he is con- 
cerned with is the real time. To determine this real time he must 
discover what bodily change it is that may be most directly related 
to the mental experience. 

We have seen that there has been a tendency to admit that 
mental phenomena may exist in time, while there has been much 
more hesitation in admitting that they may exist in space. Per- 
haps this is in part due to the fact, that many different occurrences 
may be referred to tlie same moment, without crowding each other 
out of existence ; whereas, it seems to be our experience that but 
one material thing can occupy a given space at a given time. I 
may somewhat loosely refer a sensation and the corresponding 
cerebral disturbance to the same moment of time, without being 
conscious of assimilating the one to the other, and of making the 
sensation material. But if I assign to mental phenomena a place 
— literally a place — I seem at once to turn them into material 
things, which occupy their place to the exclusion of other things. 
If I hesitate to make them so palpably material, and assign to 
them no definite place of their own, but place " in general," I 
create a phantom, an irresponsible Plotinic soul, a creature of mere 
verbal draperies. We have no experience of anything that occu- 
pies space in this abnormal way. There seems to be but one way 
of occupying space, and to occupy it in that way a thing must bo 



The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas 391 

unequivocally material. It is, hence, natural that men who have 
grasped even indefinitely the distinction between the subjective 
order and the objective should hesitate to assign to mental phe- 
nomena a location in space. 

Of course, it is evident to the discriminating mind that mental 
phenomena cannot literally be assigned a place in real time, any 
more than they can be assigned a position in real space. Real 
time is an aspect of the external world just as truly as is real 
space, and we have just seen that to determine the real time of a 
mental fact means no more than to determine the time of the cor- 
responding bodily change. But just as we can determine more or 
less definitely the time of the bodily change to which we refer a 
mental fact, and can thus, in a sense, determine the time of the 
mental fact, so we can more or less definitely determine the part of 
the body concerned most intimately in the occurrence, and thus, 
in a sense, localize the mental phenomenon. 

It is not nonsense to speak of sensations as in the brain, or at 
the brain, as the psychologist so often does. It is merely a loose 
and rather misleading way of expressing an undoubted truth. The 
sentence becomes nonsensical only when it is taken too literally. 
The exact determination of the cerebral disturbance that we are 
justified in connecting with any mental phenomenon is the only 
possible determination of the time and place of the phenomenon. 
It is this that gives it its bond of connection with the real world, 
and makes it the experience of such and such a person at such and 
such a time — an experience to he distiyiguished from every other 
which has been, is, or shall he. 

In the above pages I have, for convenience, concerned myself 
chiefly with sensations, but what has been said applies to all men- 
tal phenomena equally. When the plain man thinks about the 
matter at all, he puts the contents of his memory and imagination 
into his mind as he does his sensations, and he refers his mind to 
his body. The psychologist distinguishes much more carefully 
between presentative and representative mental contents, and 
refers the latter, not to a cerebral disturbance initiated by a mes- 
sage conducted along a sensory nerve, but to one which is centrally 
initiated, or, at least, to one which owes its character to the traces 
left by earlier messages conducted along sensory nerves. 

The proof of the fact that all ideas, as well as all sensations, 
have what is sometimes called a physical basis, we may leave to 



392 Mind and Matter 

the psychologist. It can manifestly not be proved in complete 
detail, and it can certainly not be proved in such a way as to con- 
vince those who are unwilling to believe it. It is enough to say here 
that it is in the direct line of the evidence so far furnished by the 
•development of the sciences of physiology and psychology. Accept- 
since of the fact does not in the least imply a tendency to materialize 
mental phenomena. It signifies merely that they are not left at loose 
ends, and without definite relation to the real world. It means 
that their time and place of existence, in the only sense in which 
the real time and place of anything in the subjective order can be 
spoken of at all, can be, theoretically at least, determined. It 
means that the system of things as a whole, the universe which 
contains minds as well as material things, is a Cosmos throughout, 
and that its order seems to us now indefinite and more or less 
chaotic only because we are ignorant. 

That men generally are in the habit of assigning a time and a 
place to mental phenomena of all sorts in a certain vague and 
indefinite way can hardly be denied. That the lack of clearness in 
their thought leads them into embarrassments, when one endeavors 
to get them to state what they really do believe, is equally 
evident. 

When, for example, I ask the undergraduate, who is for the 
first time seriously struggling with the difficulties of reflection, to 
imagine the City Hall, and then ask him where the image is, I am 
promptly informed that it is in his mind. When I ask the size of 
the image, he scents a trap and hesitates. The image is in his 
mind and his mind is in his body ; it is, therefore, impossible that 
the image should be nearly as large as it seems. He hazards the 
guess that, although it seems large, it must be small, and must 
represent the original as a photograph represents an object greater 
than itself. Where is this hypothetical little image ? Presumably 
in the brain. Is he conscious, when he imagines the City Hall, of 
anything like a little image in the brain ? Not in the least ; it is a 
mere matter of inference. But if this image which seems to stand 
so clearly before him is really in a place in which it does not in 
the least seem to be, and is really a minute thing when it seems 
to be an enormous one, how does he know that he is not always 
fed with illusions ? Is anything where it seems to be, and as big 
as it seems to be? He is willing to affirm that some things are, 
but he finds himself unable to offer evidence of the fact. It is a 



1 



The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas 393 

thing to be accepted — " everybody knows " that real buildings are 
not like pictures in the imagination. 

If, for the sake of argument, I accept the dictum of " every- 
body," and merely inquire more narrowly into his notion of how 
this little picture exists in the brain, I find him loath to enlighten 
me. However small the image, it seems self-evident that, to be 
an image at all, it must have some extension. Am I to conceive 
of that long row of windows as really stretching across the image ? 
Are they really side by side in the brain, so that the row occupies 
space there ? What I seem to be conscious of, the varied expanse 
of color, cannot literally be there, for the place is as dark as Egypt, 
and it is no place for colors. What, then, is there ? Surely noth- 
ing that is enough of a picture to be looked for as men look for 
such things elsewhere. The existence of the picture on the retina 
of the eye is not merely admitted by " everybody," but is a thing 
to be proved. The man who doubts the existence of such in his 
own eyes, may, if he chooses, take out one eye, remove the sclerotic 
coat from the back of it, and inspect the picture on the transparent 
retina with the eye that remains to him. The existence of the 
little picture in the brain, on the other hand, seems to be analogous 
to the existence of Mrs. Harris — evident to but one person, and 
doubtfully evident to that one. 

The more the student reflects upon the matter, the more disin- 
clined is he to stand out boldly for the little picture in the brain. 
He can be brought to see that one cannot grant the thing extension 
without assigning it a place, and a right to a certain amount of 
space, and that he who does this materializes it. He realizes that 
he cannot admit it to be material in any proper sense of the word. 
It cannot be looked for as can material things. He may conse- 
quently fall in with the ancient tradition and deny to mental 
phenomena any extension whatever. His image is now, not 
merely a small image, but it is no image at all; it has no part 
out of part. It represents things which have parts, in some un- 
known and inscrutable way, but it represents them without being 
in the least like them. 

The tendency which has resulted in such a treatment of mental 
phenomena seems to have reached its limit in the insistence by an 
eminent psychologist of our own day upon the fact that the total 
content of a consciousness at any moment must be conceived as an 
indivisible unit, as totally without parts. When the student is 



394 Mind and Matter 

intioduced to this doctrine it seems to him that something can be 
said for it. The barber's-pole which I imagine cannot reall}^ have 
white out of red and red out of Avhite, as it seems to have, or it 
would be an extended thing, it would occupy space and be material. 
On the other hand, how can a truly indivisible unit seem to have 
white out of red and red out of white. A very little thing — a 
microscopic thing — may seem to be so colored ; but it is inconceiv- 
able that a mathematical point should be variegated, and it is in- 
conceivable that it should be made to seem so. And how can my 
mental picture of a horse represent a horse unless in the sense that 
head corresponds to head, body to body, tail to tail, and legs to 
legs ? The horse I imagine does not represent the one I have seen 
"indistinguishably" ; I can specify the points of resemblance in 
detail, and they seem unmistakably distinguishable from each 
other. No real horse ever had it legs more palpably side by side 
than are the legs of the horse that I am imagining at this moment. 

What, then, shall we decide ? That they really are side by side ? 
The imaginary horse is made to occupy space. That they are not 
side by side, but only seem so ? What manner of thing has this 
imaginary horse become? What are we to conceive the true 
nature of sensations and ideas to be — not their seeming nature, for 
that appears to be mere illusion, but their real nature ? Such a 
doctrine as this, if it really were taken seriously, would make psy- 
chology an impossible science ; but the psychologist does not take 
it seriously, for he does not hesitate to analyze mental phenomena, 
to distinguish between the elements which enter into their com- 
position, and, in short, to treat them as though they were by no 
means the inconceivable entities they are sometimes described 
as being by psychologist and philosopher, but rather a something 
more or less plainly revealed in experience and capable of being 
discussed in a plain and straightforward way. 

We are extricated from our dilemma when we keep clearly 
before our mind the distinction between the subjective and tlie 
objective orders of experience. It is perfectly just to say that the 
picture of a horse in the imagination has part out of part, and that 
the legs are side by side ; to deny this fact is to deny one of the 
clearest deliverances of consciousness. It is equally just to say that 
the image is not extended and does not occupy space. The mere 
fact that we recognize the image as imaginary excludes it from the 
world of material things. 



The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas 395 

The reconciliation of the apparent contradiction lies in the per- 
ception of the truth that those who, in accordance with the ancient 
tradition, insist that the image must be denied extension, are deny- 
ing to it real extension in real space^ i.e. they are simply denying 
that sensations and ideas, as sensations and ideas, can be a part of the 
material system of things. In this they are wholly in the right. But 
they fall into error when they are misled into supposing that this 
forces them to diQnyi\\Qextensityoi the experience in itself considered, 
its complexity, its having part out of part in " crude space," subjec- 
tive space. We have seen that every experience may be assigned 
a place in the subjective order. It does not cease to be the bit of 
experience it was before, when it is placed in such a context. It 
need not lose its character and shrivel to a point. But, as holding 
its place in the subjective order, as mental phenomenon, it mani- 
festly cannot occupy real space. Its real place, in the only sense in 
which one can speak of its real place, can be indicated in no other 
way than by indicating the cerebral disturbance with which the 
experience is conceived to be connected. 

The extensity, the " crude space," of the image is, therefore, 
one thing, and the real space or place to which the image, as mental 
phenomenon, may be referred, is quite another. To confuse the 
two, and to try to thrust the image bodily into the brain, is a 
natural error. It is little wonder that one who inspects Genie and 
bottle should deny the possibility of the incarceration of the former 
in the latter without some vigorous process of preliminary con- 
densation. When one realizes that the creature never was and 
never will be in the bottle, one no longers feels under a moral 
obligation to shrink him. Crude time and crude space belong to 
the subjective order ; we may dream that years have elapsed, 
we may imagine that we have travelled over vast stretches ; we 
are not compelled to find room in real time and space for such 
imaginings. But if we have really dreamed that years have 
elapsed, and have reallj imagined these journeyings, it means 
that these experiences do not stand alone, but are in some definite 
relation to the real world, have their place^ in one sense of the 
word, if not in another. 

Perhaps the reader will object that I have not definitely ex- 
plained what is meant by this "place." I have in this and in the 
preceding chapter spoken of mental phenomena as referred to or 
connected with the body, but I have in no case described the nature 



6J6 Mind and Mattey^ 

of the connection. Can this not be made plain ? If it cannot, 
are we not employing a meaningless term, one which merely serves 
to conceal our ignorance? 

To this I answer : We have no right to ask that the relation 
of mind and body be explained^ in the usual sense of the term. 
We have seen that the interactionist, in striving to make it com- 
prehensible, has turned mind into a material thing, and has assimi- 
lated the relation to other relations with which we are familiar, 
thus putting it into a class, and relieving us of the sense of 
strangeness which has oppressed us when we have contemplated 
it. We have seen also that the parallelist, although he has detected 
the error of the interactionist, has made use of a material analogy 
in his figure of mind and matter as parallels, and has unhappily 
taken another material analogy seriously when he has attempted 
to explain how it is that mental phenomena and material phe- 
nomena are concomitant. He has assimilated the relation to that 
of different qualities referred to one substance. ^ In each case, the 
relation has been explained by putting it in the same class with 
certain other relations. 

But it has, I hope, been made clear that all such material analo- 
gies are vain. The relation of mind and body is unique, and one 
gains nothing by denying its uniqueness. That there is a distinc- 
tion between the subjective order and the objective is too plain to 
be denied. That the two orders are not independent of each other, 
but form one system, must be admitted by every one, explicitly or 
implicitly. The plain man loosely connects his mind and his body. 
These words have no occult significance ; they sum up in a sentence 
all those experiences to which reference has been made above, Le. 
the fact that when his eyes are open he sees things, and that when 
they are closed he does not ; the fact that when his ears are open 
he hears sounds, and that when they are stopped he does not, etc. 
The psychologist relates mind and body somewhat more definitely. 
Here, again, nothing more is meant than that just such facts 
as these are observed and recorded in a more painstaking way, 
and the parts of the body concerned in the experiences are more 
carefully determined. The whole body of facts thus collected is 
conveniently symbolized under the figure of parallelism, and men 
talk of a point-for-point correspondence, which they are very will- 
ing to admit they are not in a position to prove. But suppose 

1 See Chapter XX. 



The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas 397 

that the limitations of our knowledge in this direction were done 
away. Suppose that the point-for-point correspondence could be 
proved in completest detail. What would this mean? It would 
only mean that very many such facts as those above referred to 
were accurately known. Our knowledge would not differ in kind, 
but in degree, from that we now possess. Indeed, it seems incon- 
ceivable that the utmost extension of our knowledge both of matter 
and of mind should explain the relation of mind and matter as it 
seems to many desirable that it should be explained. 

This by no means implies a defect in our knowledge. It does 
not mean that we are and must remain ignorant. If a class of 
facts is really unique, no one is to be pitied for his inability to find a 
broader class under which he may subsume it, and of which he may 
declare it a species. A man may cry : Mystery ! if he looks in 
vain for something in a place in which it is conceivable that some- 
thing should be found; but he has no right to call it a mystery 
that he can discover nothing in a vacuum, or that he finds himself 
unable to assign a location to all space. 

We have seen ^ that the word " explanation " has its legitimate 
sphere of application, as have other words. In the present case, 
the demand for an explanation appears to arise out of the fact that 
mental phenomena are more or less vaguely materialized. If we 
conceive them to be material, it is not out of place to ask for an 
explanation of their relations to the body. In giving an explana- 
tion we may try to show definitely with just what class of material 
relations we are concerned, or we may admit our ignorance and 
wait for more light. The problem becomes of the same general 
nature as that of the relation of the moon to the earth. But when 
it is realized that mental phenomena must not be materialized, the 
case becomes very different. It is seen that the demand for an 
explanation has arisen out of a misconception. 

But if the relation of mind and body is so peculiar that I must 
give up all attempt to explain what it is, am I not, in speaking of 
a " reference to the body," a " relation to the body," a " connec- 
tion with the body," employing empty phrases which must remain 
without definite significance to myself and to others ? Not at all. 
I may point out in detail the facts of experience which are gathered 
up and generalized in such expressions. I may call attention to 
the difference between the subjective order and the objective, and 

1 Chapter XV. 



398 Mind and Matter 

indicate the errors into which men may fall when they confuse the 
two. I may do everything save obliterate the distinction between 
mental and material, by subsuming the former under the latter or 
the latter under the former. In a true sense of the words, I may 
explain what I mean by the expressions I use, and may even induce 
men to see the reasonableness of my doctrine. 

To hold clearly in mind all those experiences which together 
furnish us with the distinction of mind and world is clearly impos- 
sible. Some sort of a symbol, some schema^ is a necessity, and 
such a schema is offered us by the parallelist. To quarrel with 
what he offers us, because his figure may be misconceived and 
often has been misconceived, is not worth while. The thing to do 
is to use it, and to avoid being misled by it. The totality of the 
mental phenomena we commonly refer to a single organized body, 
we recognize as a mind, or a consciousness. Whether more than 
one consciousness may be referred to one body, and what may be 
meant by such a reference, are questions which will have to be dis- 
cussed later. Meanwhile, I shall merely remark that a conscious- 
ness is evidently not the same thing as consciousness^ in the broad 
sense in which the word has been used in many of the preceding 
chapters. 



CHAPTER XXV 

OF NATURAL EEALISM, HYPOTHETICAL REALISM, IDEALISM 
AND MATERIALISM 

The man who has thought out a philosophical doctrine which 
seems to him wholly new and quite different from those which 
have been advocated by his predecessors may well ask himself 
anxiously whether it would not be well for him to keep his dis- 
covery to himself. The probability that all others have been 
sitting in total darkness, and that to him alone a light has been 
revealed, is too small to be seriously taken into consideration. 

But he who has followed with patience the reflections of the 
minds which have adorned the divers schools of philosophic 
thought, may, if he has learned to resist the youthful impulse 
toward indiscriminate admiration and sweeping condemnation, 
hope to learn something from the successes and from the failures 
of all. He may see that this one has recognized one undoubted 
truth, and has, perhaps, by that very fact been led to do scant 
justice to another. He may see that that one has thereby been 
stirred up to protest, and has been betrayed by his zeal into the 
converse error. If he can devise some doctrine that seems to give 
recognition to the truth which has been perhaps unduly empha- 
sized by each school, and can thus bring about something like a 
reconciliation of the different forms of opinion, it does not seem 
unreasonable for him to set it forth. He appears to find a rela- 
tive justification for each, and, as he acknowledges his indebted- 
ness to each, he makes no preposterous claim to an abnormal 
originality, and does not have to pose as a creator out of nothing 
of philosophical doctrine. 

For the doctrine of the world and the mind set forth in the 
preceding chapters I am inclined to claim attention largely because 
it is neither very new, in its elements at least, nor very startling. 
As we have seen, it is quite in harmony with truths which have 
long been recognized by the psychologist. It merely invites him 

399 



400 Mind and Matter 

to come, by a process of reflection, to a clearer comprehension of 
their full significance, and thus to escape from certain dangers 
which menace him. In the present chapter I wish to point out 
that it does full justice to the impulse which leads men to declare 
themselves adherents of one or another of certain leading schools 
of pliilosophy, and makes it quite comprehensible that such schools 
should have arisen. I shall begin with the doctrine of the Natural 
Realists. 

The man of whom we most naturally think when we employ 
this term is Thomas Reid. The term is, to be sure, a " question- 
begging" epithet, and may be misleading, for, although it is 
natural for a man like Reid — a man gifted with robust common 
sense but not born for metaphysical analysis — to think, under 
some circumstances, as Reid did ; yet it is equally natural for an 
acuter mind to repudiate this philosophy and embrace another. 
To Reid himself his doctrine was the philosophy of Common 
Sense, and his appeal is everywhere from the perverted ingenuity 
of the philosopher to the robust judgment of the plain man. It 
is eminently natural to be a plain man before one has learned to 
be something better, and the mass of mankind have always been, 
from the point of view of the metaphysician, plain men. There is 
no serious objection to applying the title Natural Realism to the 
doctrine of the " natural man," but one must bear in mind that 
the individual thus indicated is not thereby made the subject of 
unqualified praise. 

At one time Reid regarded himself as the disciple of Berkeley, 
the idealist. But the consequences that David Hume seemed 
logically to deduce from the principles laid down by his prede- 
cessor aroused in Reid a lively discontent. A general scepticism 
by no means suited the temper of his mind ; he was unwilHng to 
regard human knowledge as limited wholly to " impressions " and 
" ideas," and he cast about for some means of egress from the 
unsubstantial prison which shut him in. An external world he 
must have, and a soul not to be confounded with a " bundle of 
perceptions." The door which he sought for he found in the 
discovery that his predecessors, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, 
Berkeley, and Hume, all based their reasonings upon an erroneous 
hypothesis, the hypothesis " that nothing is perceived but what is 
in the mind which perceives it." Once grant this hypotliesis, and 
all is lost : " Bishop Berkeley hath proved, beyond tlie possibility 



Some Theories of Mind and World 401 

of reply, that we cannot by reasoning infer the existence of matter 
from our sensations; and the author of the 'Treatise of Human 
Nature ' hath proved no less clearly, that we cannot by reasoning 
infer the existence of our own or other minds from our sensations." ^ 

The world and the mind, then, must be saved by a return to 
common sense. The plain man knows very well that he not only 
perceives sensations but perceives things. He knows that, in order 
to perceive things, he must have sensations, but he does not con- 
found the two, and realizes that they are quite unlike. The 
distinction between the two may be made clear by a little reflec- 
tion, and it may also be made clear that our knowledge of the 
world is not the result of a process of inference : — 

" The notion of extension is so familiar to us from infancy, and 
so constantly obtruded by everything we see and feel, that we are 
apt to think it obvious how it comes into the mind ; but upon a 
narrower examination we shall find it utterly inexplicable. It is 
true we have feelings of touch, which every moment present exten- 
sion to the mind ; but how they come to do so is the question ; for 
those feelings do no more resemble extension than they resemble 
justice or courage — nor can the existence of extended things be 
inferred from those feelings by any rules of reasoning ; so that the 
feelings we have by touch can neither explain how we get the 
notion, nor how we come by the belief of extended things. 

" What hath imposed upon philosophers in this matter is, that the 
feelings of touch, which suggest primary qualities, have no names, 
nor are they ever reflected upon. They pass through the mind 
instantaneously, and serve only to introduce the notion and belief 
of external things, which, by our constitution, are connected with 
them. They are natural signs, and the mind immediately passes to 
the thing signified, without making the least reflection upon the sign, 
or observing that there was any such thing. Hence it hath always 
been taken for granted that the ideas of extension, figure, and 
motion are ideas of sensation, which enter into the mind by the 
sense of touch, in the same manner as the sensations of sound and 
smell do by the ear and nose. The sensations of touch are so con- 
nected, by our constitution, with the notions of extension, figure, 
and motion, that philosophers have mistaken the one for the other, 
and never have been able to discern that they were not only dis- 
tinct things, but altogether unlike. However, if we will reason 

1 " An Inquiry into the Human Mind," Chapter V, § 7. 
2d 



402 Mind and Matter 

distinctly upon this subject, we ought to give names to those feel- 
ings of touch ; we must accustom ourselves to attend to them, and 
to reflect upon them, that we may be able to disjoin them from, and 
to compare them with, the qualities signified or suggested by them. 

" The habit of doing this is not to be attained without pains 
and practice; and till a man hath acquired this habit, it will be 
impossible for him to think distinctly, or to judge right, upon this 
subject. 

" Let a man press his hand against the table — he feels it hard. 
But what is the meaning of this ? — The meaning undoubtedly is, 
that he hath a certain feeling of touch, from which he concludes, 
without any reasoning, or comparing ideas, that there is something 
external really existing, whose parts stick so firmly together that 
they cannot be displaced without considerable force. 

" There is here a feeling, and a conclusion drawn from it, or 
some way suggested by it. In order to compare these, we must 
view them separately, and then consider by what tie they are con- 
nected, and wherein they resemble one another. The hardness of 
the table is the conclusion, the feeling is the medium by which we 
are led to that conclusion. Let a man attend distinctly to this 
medium, and to the conclusion, and he will perceive them to be as 
unlike as any two things in nature. The one is a sensation of the 
mind, which can have no existence but in a sentient being ; nor 
can it exist one moment longer than it is felt ; the other is in the 
table, and we conclude, without any difficulty, that it was in the 
table before it was felt, and continues after the feeling is over. 
The one implies no kind of extension, nor parts, nor cohesion ; the 
other implies all these. Both, indeed, admit of degrees, and the 
feeling, beyond a certain degree, is a species of pain ; but adaman- 
tine hardness does not imply the least pain. 

" And as the feeling hath no similitude to hardness, so neither 
can our reason perceive the least tie or connection between them ; 
nor will the logician ever be able to show a reason why we should 
conclude hardness from this feeling, rather than softness, or any 
other quality whatsoever. But, in reality, all mankind are led by 
their constitution to conclude hardness from this feeling." ^ 

I have taken this long extract from Reid because it admirably 
illustrates both the strength and weakness of the appeal to com- 
mon sense. I might almost as well have chosen any one from a 
1 "Inquiry," Chapter V, § 5. 



Some Theories of Mind and World 403 

multitude of others, for Reid is consistently inconsistent, and hugs 
the shore rather closely. But the passage I have taken is at least 
as good as any, and presents a curious combination of truth and 
error. 

As for the truths which it recognizes; we notice, in the first 
place, that it does not overlook the fact that extension is presented 
to the mind in feelings of touch. In the preceding pages I have 
tried to make clear what must be meant by all such statements as 
this. They may be misunderstood, but they undoubtedly contain 
an important truth. 

Again, too much emphasis cannot be laid upon the fact that the 
feelings of touch " pass through the mind instantaneously, and 
serve only to introduce the notion and belief of external things." 
This is a recognition of the truth that our experiences seem to fall 
most naturally into the objective order, when they are of such a 
kind that they may take their place in the objective order ; and a 
recognition also of the truth that the phenomena of the objective 
order stand out before the attention in a peculiarly vivid way. It 
is not easy to represent clearly to the mind what we mean by sen- 
sations, as sensations. Just for this reason have psychologist and 
philosopher been misled into talking about mental phenomena in 
the incoherent fashion with which we are all familiar. Had Reid 
recognized this truth even more clearly he might have hesitated to 
speak of sensations in the dogmatic way that is characteristic of 
him. It does not in the least follow that, because a man has sen- 
sations, he is able to describe them accurately, or even to avoid 
saying about them what a careful analysis shows to be not merely 
untrue, but even highly absurd. 

In the third place, we find some justice done to the statement 
that, when a man presses his hand against the table, he feels it 
hard. Reid's plea is for a recognition of the immediacy of this 
knowledge. When I press my hand against the table, I know it to 
be hard " without any reasoning, or comparing ideas." No man, 
who comes back to the experience which stirred Reid to protest, 
can avoid a certain sympathy with his words. Here I sit before 
my desk ; I see it ; I feel it. The desk seems to be known, 
and immediately known, in such experiences. I perceive the 
desk to be extended, to be hard. Am I to be told that what I 
perceive is not a desk at all, but, so to speak, a miniature copy? 
Am I to believe that it is not where it seems to be, out in front of 



404 Mind and Matter 

my body in space, but is, instead, perhaps in my brain, perhaps 
nowhere in particular? Am I to weakly assent to the prepos- 
terous statement that what I seem to perceive as extended is 
not really extended, that what I seem to perceive as hard is not 
really hard? Clear your mind of the imaginings of the phi- 
losophers, exercise ordinary common sense, look at this desk and 
lay your hand on it. You are conscious of sensations, of course, 
but are you ever really tempted to confound them with the desk ? 
Do you not feel now^ at this moment, that this desk is hard and 
extended — not an uncertain and hypothetical desk whose exist- 
ence is inferred from the presence of this one — but this very 
desk? 

In the doctrine which I have presented in this volume full 
justice is done to Reid's insistence that our knowledge of things 
and their qualities is not a mere knowledge of images and copies, 
but really a knowledge of the things themselves. Indeed, as we 
shall see a little later, Reid's intention was better than his execu- 
tion, and he might profitably have gone a little farther than he 
did. But what he meant to do is sufficiently plain, notwith- 
standing his inconsistencies of expression ; he meant to insist 
that we do not first know sensations and then infer the existence 
of things and their qualities from these sensations. He meant to 
deny the doctrine of representative perception. In this he was 
justified. 

In the preceding chapters I have dwelt at length upon the 
truth that the man who once consistently shuts himself up in 
the charmed circle of " impressions " and " ideas " can never 
logically issue from that circle. A world truly external can 
never be known to him ; and as there is to him no " external " 
there can be no contrasted ''internal." In other words, impres- 
sions and ideas can only be impressions and ideas to a man who 
recognizes a real world with which they stand contrasted. There 
can be no subjective without an objective. It is because men 
are inconsistent that they seem able to keep such distinctions 
when they have really obliterated them. It is of the utmost 
importance to recognize that the objective order of experience 
is as immediately known as the subjective order. This desk as 
" thing " is not known as the result of an inference from a group 
of sensations, for the sensations are only known, as sensations, 
when they are contrasted with a world of things. Tlie Natural 



Some Theories of Mind and World 405 

Realist is, then, entirely in the right, when he insists that we 
must not regard the sensations as known immediately and the 
real things to which we refer them as known at one remove. 

In the fourth place, we should notice, that Reid distinguishes, 
as he should, between sensations and the qualities of external 
things. We have seen that they are not to be confounded. Ex- 
periences recognized as having their place in the subjective order 
are sensations, and recognized as having their place in the objec- 
tive order are the qualities of things. They are not to be treated 
alike ; a truth which Reid recognizes in the statement that they 
differ as widely "as any two things in nature," and in denying 
to the sensation extension, parts, and cohesion. In this we may 
cheerfully follow him, merely stopping to point out why it is 
that we may not ascribe space-relations to mental phenomena in 
any literal sense of the words. We may yield the same willing 
assent to his statement that the sensation can exist only so long 
as it is felt, but that the quality of the table may exist before it 
is felt, and continue to exist after the feeling is over. This 
merely means that existence in the objective order is not to be 
confounded with existence in the subjective, a truth which is 
more or less clearly recognized by every one who has arrived at 
the distinction between sensations and things. 

It is evident from the foregoing that Reid had laid hold of a 
good many of the distinctions which have been discussed in the 
preceding chapters. This is scarcely surprising, for those dis- 
tinctions are implicit in the thought of the natural man, and 
are recognized in a way even by common sense. But common 
sense is a poor staff to lean upon in the long journey which 
has to be made by the metaphysician. It is impossible to read 
the extract which we have been discussing without discovering 
that Reid's thought was far from clear and far from consistent. 
He vigorously opposed the doctrine of representative perception, 
yet the doctrine with which he would replace it seems so curi- 
ously like it, that it is possible for his sympathetic editor, Sir 
William Hamilton, to maintain that he was not a Natural Realist 
at all. It seems, however, more just to allow him the title, for 
his very inconsistency gives him a peculiar right to stand as the 
representative of the natural man, who is repelled by the doctrine 
of representative perception as it has been worked out with of- 
fensive completeness by the philosopher, and who insists that he 



406 Mind and Matter 

really knows external things, but can give no very articulate 
account of what he means by his statement. 

We have heard Reid tell us that feelings of touch at every 
moment '' present extension to the mind," but before he has finished 
his paragraph we discover that it is not really extension that is 
presented to the mind but the notion of extension, and the belief 
that there exist extended things. This is reiterated in the follow- 
ing paragraph, where we are told that the feelings of touch " serve 
only to introduce the notion and belief of external things, which, 
by our constitution, are connected with them." The '•'- ideas of 
extension, figure, and motion " are expressly recognized, and Reid's 
only concern appears to be to insist that these ideas or notions 
are not to be confounded with the sensations of touch, and are 
to be recognized as quite unlike them. 

At once we are impelled to ask : Are these ideas or notions of 
extension, figure, and motion to be regarded as external ? are they 
identical with the extensions, figures, and motions of the external 
world ? The question finds its answer in the mere fact that the 
words " idea " and " notion " are used at all. The hardness of the 
table pressed against is surely neither "idea," "notion" nor "be- 
lief." These terms Reid would himself have been willing to rec- 
ognize as standing for something " which can have no existence, 
save in a sentient being." 

We appear, then, to have to do, not merely with sensations 
and external qualities, but with sensations, ideas, or notions of 
external qualities, and external qualities themselves. That in 
passing from sensations to the notion and belief one makes a 
transition, Reid admits when he distinguishes them as sign and 
thing signified; but he appears quite to overlook the fact that 
in passing from the notion and belief to the external thing he 
is making still another transition. He simply ignores the dis- 
tinction emphasized by the advocate of the doctrine of representa- 
tive perception. It is not that he has bridged the gulf between 
thoughts and things, or in any way indicated what ma}^ be meant 
by a knowledge of things. He has simply assumed that in having 
the notion and belief he has the thing ^ and he throws the onus 
prohandi upon his " constitution." 

But, notwithstanding Reid's anxiety to arrive at external things 
" without any reasoning, or comparing ideas," he has an uneasy 
consciousness that his knowledge of things is not immediate. He 



Some Theories of Mind and World 407 

cannot wholly overlook the fact, recognized clearly enough by the 
plain man, that he would not know things if he had no sensations. 
The sensation seems to him to be a starting-point, the thing to 
be a terminus. He concludes that there is something external; 
the co7iclusion is drawn from the feeling " or in some way suggested 
by it " ; the feeling is the medium by which we are led to the 
conclusion. It is true that the existence of external things cannot 
be inferred from the feelings of touch " by any rules of reasoning," 
but men are impelled to make just such inferences by their nature 
or constitution, and are under no obligation to justify them by 
reasoning.^ 

It is unnecessary to heap together a multitude of such expres- 
sions as these. They are scattered all over Reid's pages, and 
they abundantly prove that he did not completely confound the 
idea or notion of extension with extension itself. It does not 
sound nonsensical to state that the existence of extended things 
cannot be inferred from feelings of touch — to many men it has 
seemed that the existence of such things is a legitimate subject 
of doubt. But it seems quite gratuitous to discuss whether the 
existence of the idea of extension may be inferred from sensations. 
Neither Descartes, nor Locke, nor Hume, nor any one else whom 
Reid was anxious to refute, ever dreamt of denying such an 
existence. What Reid wanted to establish was the existence of 
external things, not the existence of the ideas of such or of beliefs 
in such. It is everywhere evident in his pages that, although he 
slurs over the distinction between ideas and things, he does not 
completely discard it, and also that he finds in ideas, indorsed by 
our "constitution," a guarantee of the existence of things, an 
existence which is thus admitted not to be known immediately. 
There is really very little difference between the Cartesian doc- 
trine that the existence of an external world is only assured to 
us by the fact that a good God would not deceive us, and the 
doctrine of Reid, which finds the guarantee in our constitution. 
In either case one is taking the word of another for what is not 
self-evident. 

It is peculiarly interesting to note how a man who has begun 

with an energetic protest against the doctrine of representative 

perception has a tendency to slip into some form of that doctrine 

when he attempts to define and defend his own. This is precisely 

1 *' Inquiry," Chapter II, § 7. 



408 Mind and Matter 

what we might expect. The natural man believes that he per- 
ceives things, it is true, but he also recognizes that he has ideas, 
and believes that his ideas in some way represent things. How 
easy it is for him to be led to emphasize this aspect of his beliefs 
becomes evident when we see him fall into the hands of the psy- 
chologist. He experiences no shock when he is informed that 
a mind can know no more of the external world than is contained 
in the messages conducted to the brain along the sensory nerves. 
It is only when the consequences of such a doctrine are rigorously 
deduced and exhibited to him, and when he feels himself in danger 
of losing an external world altogether, that his mind revolts. Reid 
is with him, heart and soul. We must not deny that he is a Nat- 
ural Realist because he arrives at an external world by inference. 
That is but one aspect of his doctrine. Natural Realism contains 
all sorts of truths and all sorts of errors. It is not, properly speak- 
ing, a philosophy, but rather the raw materials out of which a 
philosophy must be made. It is the position of the plain man — 
the position from which we must all set out when we enter upon 
the path of reflection ; unless, indeed, we adopt some ready-made 
philosophy, and prefer riding on another man's back to exercising 
our own legs. And even then we can scarcely avoid putting a 
foot to the ground from time to time. 

But though Natural Realism may serve its purpose as a point 
of departure, it is no place to take up one's lodging. One does 
not go to the station to sit indefinitely upon its benches. It is mel- 
ancholy to think with what high purposes Thomas Reid set him- 
self to work, and how little he has done to throw light on any of 
those dark places which we are all anxious to see illumined. Let 
the following passage stand as a warning to those who lounge at 
the station: — 

" Perception, as we here understand it, hath always an object 
distinct from the act by which it is perceived ; an object which 
may exist whether it be perceived or not. I perceive a tree that 
grows before my window; there is here an object which is per- 
ceived, and an act of the mind by which it is perceived ; and these 
two are not only distinguishable, but they are extremely unlike in 
their natures. The object is made up of a trunk, branches, and 
leaves ; but the act of the mind by which it is perceived hath 
neither trunk, branches, nor leaves. I am conscious of this act of 
?nv mind, and I can reflect upon it; but it is too simple to admit of 



Some Theories of Mind and World 409 

an analysis, and I cannot find proper words to describe it. I find 
nothing that resembles it so much as the remembrance of the tree, 
or the imagination of it. Yet both these differ essentially from 
perception ; they differ likewise one from another. It is in vain 
that a philosopher assures me, that the imagination of the tree, the 
remembrance of it, and the perception of it, are all one, and differ 
only in degree of vivacity. I know the contrary ; for I am as well 
acquainted with all the three as I am with the apartments of my 
own house. I know this also, that the perception of an object 
implies both a conception of its form and a belief of its present 
existence. I know, moreover, that this belief is not the effect 
of argumentation and reasoning; it is the immediate effect of 
my constitution." ^ 

In this passage Reid makes a distinction, as he should, between 
percept and thing. But is it possible to leave the nature of the 
percept, and the nature of its relation to the thing, more absolutely 
obscure than Reid has left them? The tree has trunk, branches, 
and leaves ; the percept has not. The percept does not resemble 
the tree, but it does resemble the remembrance of the tree, or the 
imagination of the tree. But do not trees pictured in the imagi- 
nation appear to have trunk, branches, and leaves ? and is not the 
tree perceived — not the one suggested^ inferred^ or believed in — is 
not this tree as composite as it seems to be ? Alas ! these things 
cannot be as they seem, for they are " acts of the mind," too simple 
to admit of analysis; and we must not attempt to describe them, 
but must confine ourselves to denying that they in any way resemble 
external things. 

It is clear that anything like a science of psychology is impos- 
sible where mental phenomena are consistently treated as unan- 
alyzable and indescribable. As a matter of fact, the science of 
psychology has deliberately set aside Reid's doctrine, and has 
furnished an analysis of the percept, finding it composite, distin- 
guishing its elements, referring this to the sense and that to the 
imagination. It has made it quite comprehensible that the per- 
cept of a tree should represent a tree and not represent " justice 
or courage." And when the psychologist recognizes that a given 
experience, in order to be classed as subjective, must be denied 
real extension and a position in real space, but must not on that 
account be robbed of its own nature as revealed in consciousness, 

1 " Inquiry," Chapter VI, § 20. 



-1:10 Mind and Matter 

then he is even justified in saying that the percept of a tree re- 
sembles a real tree as it does not resemble justice or courage. 

In one respect Reid's doctrine seems to leave the whole prob- 
lem of perception even more obscure than it is to the mind of the 
plain man when he is let alone by the philosopher. To genuine 
common sense it does not seem wholly incomprehensible that 
ideas should represent things, for, after all, ideas seem to have 
some resemblance to things. The house that is imagined is not 
an external thing, but it certainly seems to have roof and walls, 
windows and dooi^s, and in all these respects to be like a real 
house — at least something like a real house. But with Reid the 
denial of resemblance is complete, and it becomes inconceivable 
that such a thing as the percept should even ^' suggest " a house. 

If it remains obscure to the plain man what is meant, in gen- 
eral, by the statement that ideas represent things, the obscurity 
is certainly not relieved by giving such an account of ideas that it 
becomes inconceivable that any particular idea should represent any 
particular thing better than any other. Under such circumstances 
it becomes quite hopeless to attempt to make anytliing clear ; one 
is reduced to sheer dogmatism, to mere asseveration : '•• I know this 
also, that the perception of an object implies both a conception of 
its form and a belief of its present existence." What L«5 this per- 
ception like ? How is one to think of it ? It cannot be described. 
What does it mean to say that it resembles imagination ? The 
statement cannot be made clearer, it can only be repeated. What 
does it signify to say that the perception implies this or that? No 
answer is forthcoming. What is the conception of the form of the 
object? Has it itself any form? Is it extended? Or is it an 
unanalyzable and part-less thing like the percept ? Does it 
"imply" the object as the percept appears to "imply" it? And 
what is meant by belief? When are beliefs reasonable, and when 
unreasonable? Finally, is it possible to point out at all clearly 
what is meant by the words present existence? 

To none of these questions does " our constitution " even make 
a pretence of furnishing an answer. It appears to be its function 
to lead us to string together into sentences words which have to 
us no definite meaning, and to defend stubbornly the sentences 
thus constructed against all the assaults of reflection. 

It is clear that it was not necessary for Reid to take refuge in 
mere dogmatism. He might have defended the external world 



Some Theories of Mind and World 411 

intelligently, by undertaking a careful analysis of experience, and 
by pointing out the real difference between sensations and things. 
That he was justified in making a protest, and the particular 
nature of the misconceptions into which he was betrayed, seem to 
be revealed with some clearness in the light of the doctrine which 
has been advocated in the preceding chapters. We see that we 
cannot wholly condemn Reid, and we also see that we cannot 
frankly justify him. 

On the other hand, we must admit a relative justification also 
to those whose position he so vigorously opposed. We have seen 
how Reid tended to slip unconsciously into the form of doctrine 
which was the object of his attack. This is condemned by his 
editor, Sir William Hamilton, as a weakness unworthy of him, 
and it is insisted that we must hold to a Natural Realism of a 
purer type. Yet the careful reader of Sir William's works dis- 
covers that the doctrine actually held by the latter is, after all, a 
doctrine of representative perception. Existence "as it is in it- 
self " is carefully distinguished from existence " as it is revealed 
to us " ; man is a creature that inspects, not things, but the pic- 
tures of things — rerumque ignarus^ imagine gaudet?- It is wonder- 
fully easy to adopt this doctrine, as innumerable psychologists 
and psychologies bear witness. To condemn it as mere error is 
unwise, for, as we have seen, it is at bottom a recognition of the 
undoubted truth that every element of experience may take its 
place in the subjective order. 

I need not here dwell upon the position of the psychologist, 
for that has been done sufficiently already. It is a dual position, 
and while it insists upon giving to the subjective order its rights, 
it saves itself by tacitly recognizing, as Reid tried explicitly to 
recognize, the fact that we have an experience of things. It is 
only the philosopher, who emphasizes one of the aspects of truth 
recognized by the plain man at the expense of another, who is 
driven to strange devices to secure a dubious right to believe in 
a shadowy external world. 

And it is interesting to note that even the philosopher cannot 
wholly put off humanity, and must involuntarily take his place 
from time to time beside Reid. " I have often remarked, in many 
instances," writes Descartes, "that there is a great difference 
between an object and its idea. "^ Strange that he should have 
1 "Lectures on Metaphysics," VIIL ^ Meditation Troisi^me. 



412 Mind and Matter 

remarked this, when he has all his life perceived nothing but 
ideas ! " Thus I see, whilst I write this," says Locke, " I can 
change the appearance of the paper, and by designing the letters 
tell beforehand what new idea it shall exhibit the very next 
moment, by barely drawing my pen over it, which will neither 
appear (let me fancy as much as I will), if my hands stand still, 
or though I move my pen, if my eyes be shut ; nor, when those 
characters are once made on the paper, can I choose afterward 
but see them as they are : that is, have the ideas of such letters 
as I have made. Whence it is manifest, that they are not barely 
the sport and play of my own imagination, when I find that the 
characters that were made at the pleasure of my own thought do 
not obey them ; nor yet cease to be, whenever I shall fancy it ; 
but continue to affect the senses constantly and regularly, accord- 
ing to the figures I made them." ^ 

These sentences might have been penned by Reid. They are 
an unconscious tribute to the doctrine, implicit in common thought, 
that our knowledge of an external world is as direct and immediate 
as our knowledge of an internal. So I feel myself justified in 
claiming both Descartes and Locke, as well as Reid, to be wit- 
nesses to the truth of the theory which I advocate. I can do this 
with the better conscience, as I have no objection to their holding 
still to their doctrine of representative perception — in a modified 
form, i.e. in such a form as not to make it incredible that any one 
should ever arrive at the notion of an external world at all. 

As for the Idealist, it is clear that he is in the same toils as the 
Hypothetical Realist. He marks the fact that every experience 
can take its place in the subjective order, and he dubs every 
experience "idea." But he is sufficiently clear-minded to see 
that, if we shut the mind up absolutely to its ideas, it cannot 
possibly know its ideas to be representative of things. If we allow 
Berkeley to describe the " objects of human knowledge " as he 
does in the first section of his "Principles" — if we recognize 
under that head nothing else than ideas of sense, ideas of memory 
and imagination, the passions and operations of the mind, and the 
self that perceives them — we must admit that his battle is won at 
the outset, for it is useless to attempt to know what cannot by any 
possibility become an object of human knowledge. No thing is 
given directly, and no thing can be logically inferred from what is 
1 *' Essay," Book IV, Chapter XI, § 7. 



Some Theories of Mind and World 413 

given directly. We must grant to Berkeley the credit of seeing 
more clearly than did Descartes and Locke the truth that no pro- 
cess of adding and subtracting ideas can result in a something that 
is not a complex of ideas. By manipulating numbers we can get 
numbers, but we cannot get something of a wholly different nature. 
It is useless to endeavor to manufacture an objective order out of 
phenomena which belong admittedly to the subjective order. This is 
what Berkeley does when he turns ideas of a certain vivid and 
orderly nature into " real things." His " real things," in so far as 
they are ideas, are percepts, and remain subjective. It is quite 
proper to distinguish in the subjective order between sensation and 
imagination, between percept and sensory image ; every psycholo- 
gist recognizes such distinctions. But it is not proper, having 
made the distinction, to call certain of the phenomena of the 
subjective order " real things " and force them to play the role of 
an external world. 

Hence, if we must credit Berkeley with a clearer insight than 
Descartes and Locke, we must also admit that he was more lacking 
in common sense. That is to say, that vague recognition of the 
fact that there is an external world, that it is not a something 
groped for as a result of an inference from ideas, and that it is as 
directly known as are ideas themselves — that vague recognition 
of a truth, which the plain man can champion but cannot defend, 
was present to the minds of Descartes and Locke, and led them to 
wheel around with shameless inconsistency when it became evident 
that their path led to a desert. Berkeley continued his journey in 
spite of the protest of common sense. He hardly seems to have 
heard its still small voice, which is, it must be admitted, a muffled 
voice, and scarcely articulate. And yet may we not assume that 
he heard it faintly after all, since he was moved to plant his desert 
with percepts and to call them trees ? 

Upon the impossibility of getting along without an external 
world — a real external world, and not a sham " projection " — I 
have dwelt in another chapter. ^ But he who finds it inconceivable 
that a man should attempt to do it, either was not born to be a 
metaphysician, or is new to the trade. Idealism is the weakness 
of acute minds, not of dull ones. It means that a certain truth 
has been grasped, and firmly grasped, but that another has been 
overlooked. 

1 Chapter XXII. 



414 Mind and Matter 

The truth which the Idealist fails to recognize is much empha- 
sized by the Materialist. A realm of minds without a physical 
basis seems to him a floating wreath of mist, a chaos of impalpable 
unrealities. I hope it has been made clear in the preceding chap- 
ters how much truth lies hid in his contention. Without the 
objective order, without the real world in space and time, there 
would be no world at all, in any proper sense of the word, no 
universe of things and minds, no system, no experience. When 
we quarrel with the Materialist, we must not utterly repudiate all 
he says, for he speaks truth sometimes, and not error. 



CHAPTER XXVI 
THE WORLD AS UNPERCEIVED, AND THE "UNKNOWABLE" 

In Chapter XXIII I have touched upon the topic upon which 
I propose to speak in this chapter, and it is possible that I have 
there said enough to bring my thought clearly before the acute 
reader who is accustomed to such analyses as I have attempted to 
make. It is, however, scarcely possible to be too explicit, when 
one is dealing with ideas so elusive, and ideas which different men 
appear to see in very different lights. I shall, accordingly, come 
back again to the distinction between the mind and the world, and 
shall try to render it more unmistakable by answering a question, 
which arises in many minds, and to which many men seem to find 
it difficult to give a satisfactory answer. 

We have seen that we must accept the fact that we perceive a 
real external world. It will not do to regard this world as a com- 
plex of sensations, an idea, or a " projection." The external world 
must really be external^ that is to say, it must carefully be distin- 
guished from the contents of any mind. Certainly it is thus that 
science, as science, treats it. The geologist, for example, has no hesi- 
tation in placing before us a picture of the earth as it was before it was 
in a condition to be the seat of life, and in describing the successive 
stages by which it has come to be what it is. He is ready to 
admit that his account may be more or less inaccurate ; that the 
limitations of his knowledge cause him to walk upon rather uncer- 
tain ground. But, such as it is, he believes his account to be a 
description of the world as it was in ages past. He does not suppose 
for a moment that he is busying himself with the sensations or 
ideas of any creature past or present. He recognizes, of course, 
that at certain earlier periods of the world's history there existed 
brutes to whom we must attribute a psychic life of some sort, and 
that there now exist men who may have a highly complex mental 
life. But it seems to him absurd to maintain that the series of 
physical changes which have taken place upon this planet is to be 

415 



416 Mind and Matter 

identified with the mental experience of any brute or any man. 
Let the psychologist concern himself with sensations and ideas ; he 
will tell us something about the external world. 

Thus, he gives us an account of the condition of things before 
the appearance of life upon the earth, and he expects us to accept 
his statements as true or partly true, or, at least, more probably true 
than some other statement that might be made upon the subject. 
He adduces his facts, and points out the grounds for his conclusions. 
He does not appear to be speaking at random. So long as we 
remain within the limits of his science, we can make no general 
objection to his attempt to enlighten us. 

But if we are at all given to metaphysical reflection, there 
appears to rise up before us what, at first sight, seems to be a very 
serious objection, not merely to the particular description which 
he has seen fit to give, but to every description which it is pos- 
sible for him to give. We realize with a start that he is bringing 
before us the world as we might have perceived it, could we have 
been present at the time of which he is speaking. 

Now, we have seen that there is no element in the objective 
order of experience which mag not be referred to the subjective 
order ; that is to say, which may not be shown to bear a significant 
relation to our sense-organs and our nervous system. Certain 
elements of our experience are, when referred to the subjective 
order, called touch-movement sensations ; these elements, referred 
to the objective order, appear to be the very stuff of which the ex- 
ternal world is made. But could any creature perceive an exter- 
nal world made of such stuff, if he were himself so constituted 
that he could have no touch-movement sensations ? Can we not 
conceive of an external world revealed to some other creature in 
experiences of some other sort? Indeed, must we not assume that 
any external world upon which any creature can gaze must be, in 
a sense, a function of that creature itself? A truth which the 
psychologist expresses in his own way in maintaining that we can 
know no more of the external world than is revealed to us through 
our sensations. 

The world, then, as we conceive it to have existed at the 
remote period of which we are speaking, is such a world as may be 
perceived by man, a being with given sense-organs and a given 
nervous system. At the date in question no such being existed ; 
there were no sense-organs and tliere was no nervous system of 



The World as Unperceived, and the " UnJcnoivahle " 417 

any sort. Could there, under these circumstances, have been in 
existence such a world as we are asked to believe in ? The very- 
elements of which it is composed appear to be dependent upon 
conditions which are, by hypothesis, absent. The difficulty seems 
to be a desperate one, for we lose, apparently, not only this par- 
ticular external world appropriate to man, but everything that can 
bear the remotest analogy to it. Where there are no senses what- 
ever and no nervous system of any sort, there cannot be sensations 
of any kind ; and we know absolutely nothing of an external world 
which is composed of elements incapable of being regarded in the 
light of sensations. 

Can we, then, say that, before the advent of life, the earth 
really existed under the form pictured to us by the geologist? 
Can we say that it existed under an^ form? 

If we turn from the consideration of the past existence of the 
external world to that of its present existence, we find ourselves 
confronted by much the same problem. The world as it now pre- 
sents itself to me is composed of sensation-stuff, that is to say, of 
elements which, regarded from another point of view, must be 
given the name of sensations. I must recognize the fact that, 
were my bodily constitution different, the world upon which I gaze 
would be a more or less different world. It is because I am what 
I am that I perceive this table before me to be what it is. A series 
of beings differing more and more widely from me would perceive 
a series of tables (may I be permitted the use of the word ?) differ- 
ing more and more widely from this one. What if the difference 
goes beyond a difference in degree ? What if senses and nervous 
system disappear altogether ? Must not the table disappear too ? 
Can a table unperceived by any one exist under any form whatever ? 
And if it cannot exist under any form, can it mean anything 
whatever to say that it exists? 

We are brought around, thus, to an old difficulty. We have 
seen that a world really external, a world not to be confounded 
with the perceptions in any mind, is an absolute necessity, if there 
is to be a scheme of things, an experience, at all. If there is no 
external world there are no sensations, no perceptions, no minds, 
for the distinctions which give these words their significance are 
lost. And if the external world is really something distinct from 
the perceptions of all possible minds, it is absurd to say that it has 
no existence except in the perceptions of such minds. 



418 Mind and Matter 

It exists in space and time, it has a past, a present, a future ; 
it exists continuously ; and the perceptions of minds are evanes- 
cent flashes, which come into being at this or that moment of time, 
and which straightway disappear. And yet, when we ask : What 
is this external world which is not to be confounded with the per- 
ceptions of any mind ? can we give any account of it ? we seem 
to find nothing in our hands save perceptions — the world as it 
presents itself to this mind or to that — and we are tempted to 
talk of " projections." 

As the reader will see, we have before us the distinction 
between the world as it is and the world as it seems to us. This 
distinction impresses one as reasonable ; and yet, when one faces 
the difficulty of making clear what one means by the world as it is 
one is puzzled to know how to justify it. 

There is a cheap and easy way of extricating oneself from 
one's difficulties, but it is a poor way. One has only to distin^ 
guish between " Reality" and its "Manifestations" and to maintain 
that we know Reality only in or through its manifestations, and 
cannot expect to know it as it is in itself. 

We may, thus, say that there is a real external world, and 
when we are asked to explain what it is, we may refuse to answer 
on the ground that the question is an illegitimate one. In main- 
taining that there is such a world, or at least that there is an exter- 
nal Reality, we seem to find a door of escape from " the insanities 
of idealism," 2 and to attain at least something to which mental 
phenomena, perceptions, may be related, and thus be saved from 
the fate of constituting a world of mere phantasms. On the other 
hand, in holding that this external Reality is unknowable, we free 
ourselves from the obligation of trying to explain to any one how 
it must be conceived. It is not to be conceived at all, for all con- 
ceiving must be in terms of consciousness ; it is not like anything, 
so we may abandon the attempt to say what it is like. It is 
enough that it exists, and by its existence saves the world of our 
experiences from being mere illusion. 

I have said that this way of solving the problem brought for- 
ward above is a poor one. When we examine it with care we 
find it so very poor that we cannot but wonder that any thoughtful 
man who has reflected upon it can regard it as satisfactory. 

We see, in the first place, that there is absolutely no founda- 
1 Spencer, "First Principles," Part II, Cliapter III, § 40. 



The World as Unjperceived, and the " Unknowable " 419 

tion in our experience for the assumption of the existence of this 
external Reality, this Unknowable. I beg the reader to recall to 
mind the true position of the man in the cell.^ What has he to 
go upon? What may he assume to exist and what may he not? 
If he really has experience of appearances, and only of appear- 
ances, if it is inconceivable that he should ever have experience 
of Reality, how can he know an appearance to be such, and to be 
a something that stands over against Reality as contrasted with 
it ? Can he even think of Reality ? His thinking is appearance 
and nothing more. It is impossible for our prisoner to create, by 
pushing about the furniture in his cell, a something that is not 
composed of furniture. But I have already discussed this point 
at such length that it is not necessary for me to dilate upon it 
here. 

In the second place, it should not be forgotten that it is quite 
impossible to regard this Unknowable as related to our experi- 
ences as a whole, as reality is related to appearance within our 
experience. 

The distinction between appearance and reality is a perfectly 
justifiable one ; more than that, it is a very useful one. I have 
pointed out ^ that the distinction is one which every man is forced 
to draw at some time or other, and one which the man of science 
cannot possibly overlook. It sounds odd to no one to say that, 
although a certain tree looks, at a distance, small and blue, the 
tree really is large and green ; the scholar finds no fault with the 
statement that, although a given material thing appears to fill 
space continuously, it really is composed of moving atoms at con- 
siderable distances from each other. We are constantly distin- 
guishing between things as they appear and things as they are, 
and it is not until we fall into the hands of the metaphysician 
that the fact seems to us worthy of comment. 

But, we should surely bear in mind that, when we thus distin- 
guish between appearance and reality, we are simply recognizing 
a certain relation between given phenomena in our experience. 
It never occurs to us to connect this or that appearance with this 
or that reality at random. Each appearance must be connected 
with its appropriate reality, and we must be able to ascertain what 
that particular appropriate reality is. The experience which I may 
call " the tree as seen from a distance " must be connected with 
1 See Chapter II. « Chapters VIII and IX. 



420 Mind and Matter 

the experience which I may call " the tree as seen close at hand " ; 
to connect it, as appearance, with the experience "the horse as 
seen close at hand," as reality, is nothing less than absurd. As I 
have pointed out in the chapters referred to just above, our experi- 
ences fall into groups ; within each of these groups a single expe- 
rience may stand for any or all of the others ; all the experiences 
in a group are not accorded equal values ; certain experiences fall 
into the subordinate position of signs, and others, in which the 
mind rests as the most satisfactory representatives of the group 
as a whole, take the more dignified position of thing signified. The 
experience which serves as sign is appearance ; that to which the 
mind passes, and in which it rests, is reality. 

Thus the words " appearance " and " reality " have a definite 
connotation which must not be disregarded when the words are used. 
To be the reality to which any appearance is referred, a thing must 
fulfil certain definite conditions. It must be an experience belong- 
ing to the same group with the appearance ; and it must be a 
peculiarly satisfactory member of that group, a good representa- 
tive that can give more information than other members touching 
the group as a whole. 

Now, it is clear that an external Reality of the sort which we 
are discussing, an Unknowable, which cannot have its place in 
experience at all, is ludicrously unsuited to plajang the role of the 
reality to which any appearance may be referred. It cannot be 
a member of the same group of experiences with any appearance, 
and of course it cannot be an important member. It can give no 
information regarding anything. Hence, an external Reality of 
this sort is evidently not a reality to which one may refer an appear- 
ance ; it is absurd to speak of its manifestations — they do not 
belong to it^ in any intelligible sense whatever. The distinction, 
then, between the world as it seems to us and the world as it is, if 
by the world as it is we mean an Unknowable, is something abso- 
lutely different from the general distinction we are always making 
between things as they seem and things as they are. The external 
Reality is not a reality at all; it is a mere word, a sound, with 
misleading associations. 

How mere a nothing this Unknowable is, is borne in upon 
one irresistibly when one reflects that its advocate can make no 
statement regarding it which cannot be shown to be illegitimate. 
Shall we say it exists? Presumably by this we mean that it 



The World as Unperceived, and the " Unhnowahle " 421 

-exists really, and not merely in the imagination. But our evidence 
that a thing exists as a real thing and not as a mere figment of the 
imagination lies in the discovery that it belongs to the objective 
order of experience. The Unknowable cannot fulfil this con- 
dition. Shall we say that it is external? What is it that distin- 
guishes things external from things internal? Manifestly, the 
order to which they belong, their context. The Unknowable 
belongs to no order; it has no context. Shall we say that we 
may, at least, call the Unknowable an unknown Cause ? The rela- 
tion of cause and effect is a relation of antecedence and conse- 
quence in the objective order. The word " cause " becomes a hollow 
shell when we have abstracted the whole content of the concep- 
tion of causality, and it addresses itself to the ear, not to the 
mind. 

It seems plain that the man who seeks a way of escape from 
the " insanities of idealism " will not do well to betake himself 
to the Unknowable. What he wants is a world which really 
•existed in the remote past ; which really exists now when no one 
perceives it; which will really exist in the future — a world spread 
out in space and time, to which different minds existing at differ- 
ent times or at the same time may be related, and through which 
they may be related to each other. If there be such a world, it 
seems that the universe may be a Cosmos^ an orderly system of 
things. 

But the Unknowable does not bear the faintest resemblance to 
«uch a world, and can serve none of the purposes which such a 
world may serve. It cannot serve to order anything. It is im- 
possible to construct a Cosmos out of the unattached and unrelated 
groups of mental phenomena allowed us by the idealist plus the 
mere cipher offered us by the advocate of the Unknowable. 

Let the reader attempt the construction. Let him carefully 
purge the conception of the Unknowable of all those glimmerings 
of meaning with which a careless thinker is apt to sully its virgin 
purity and degrade it to the level of things knowable. Let him 
remember that it has not existed in the past, does not exist in the 
present, and will not exist in the future, for it is above temporal 
distinctions. Let him remember that it is not and never was any- 
where^ nor were its parts, for it is above spatial distinctions, and 
a genuine Unknowable must not have parts. Let him remember 
that it is not real^ is not external^ and is not a cause, in any sense 



422 Mind and Matter 

of those words with which he is familiar. Finally, let him remem- 
ber that it is not present to consciousness^ is not behind the veU, 
and does not underlie phenomena^ in any intelligible sense of those 
expressions. Having thoroughly washed it free of all meaning, 
let him try to use it in the construction of a universe. Can it 
explain why any man has a given experience at a given time ? 
Can it explain why one man may see the world under a somewhat 
different guise from that under which another man sees it ? Can 
it even help to make intelligible what is meant by a given timcy 
a given plaee^ one man, another man ? 

I am speaking, of course, of the Unknowable in its purity, of 
an external Reality which is not external and which is not real. 
Those who pin their faith to the Unknowable do not, as a matter 
of fact, wash it as clean as this. I suppose we shall always regard 
Mr. Spencer as the high-priest of this particular cult ; and it is a 
part of the honor accorded to the most prominent representative of 
any class that he must bear the brunt of the criticisms brought 
against the class as a whole. I have no intention of examining in 
detail his arguments for the Unknowable, but it is well worth 
while to linger a little in contemplation of the impurities which he 
has allowed to attach themselves to the conception. It is the 
presence of these impurities that lends to the Unknowable the 
fascination which it exercises over many minds ; no man can be 
greatly charmed by a mere vacuum. Mr. Spencer writes ; ^ — 

"Hence our firm belief in objective reality. When we are 
taught that a piece of matter, regarded by us as existing exter- 
nally, cannot be really known, but that we can know only cer- 
tain impressions produced on us, we are yet, by the relativity 
of thought, compelled to think of these in relation to a cause 
— the notion of a real existence which generated these impres- 
sions becomes nascent. If it be proved that every notion of a 
real existence which we can frame is inconsistent with itself — 
that matter, however conceived by us, cannot be matter as it 
actually is — our conception, though transfigured, is not destroyed : 
there remains the sense of reality, dissociated as far as possible 
from those special forms under which it was before represented 
in thought. Though Philosoph}^ condemns successively each 
attempted conception of the Absolute ; though in obedience to 

1 " First Principles," Part I, Chapter IV, § 20. I quote only the closing para- 
graphs of Mr. Spencer's argument. 



The World as Unperceived, and the " Unknoiodble " 423 

it we negative, one after another, each idea as it arises, yet, as 
we cannot expel the entire contents of consciousness, there ever 
remains behind an element which passes into new shapes. The 
continual negation of each particular form and limit simply results 
in the more or less complete abstraction of all forms and limits, 
and so ends in an indefinite consciousness of the unformed and 
unlimited. 

"And here we come face to face with the ultimate difficulty — 
how can there possibly be constituted a consciousness of the un- 
formed and unlimited, when, by its very nature, consciousness is 
possible only under forms and limits? Though not directly 
withdrawn by the withdrawal of its conditions, must not the raw 
material of consciousness be withdrawn by implication? Must 
it not vanish when the conditions of its existence vanish ? That 
there must be a solution of this difficulty is manifest; since 
even those who would put it do, as already shown, admit that 
we have some such consciousness ; and the solution appears to 
be that above shadowed forth. Such consciousness is not, and 
cannot be, constituted by any single mental act, but is the prod- 
uct of many mental acts. In each concept there is an element 
which persists. It is impossible for this element to be absent 
from consciousness and for it to be present in consciousness alone : 
either alternative involves unconsciousness — the one from want 
of the substance, the other from want of the form. But the 
persistence of this element under successive conditions necessi- 
tates a sense of it as distinguished from the conditions and inde- 
pendent of them. The sense of a something that is conditioned in 
every thought cannot be got rid of because the something cannot 
be got rid of. How, then, must the sense of this something be 
constituted? Evidently by combining successive concepts de- 
prived of their limits and conditions. We form this indefinite 
thought, as we form many of our definite thoughts, by the coales- 
cence of a series of thoughts. Let me illustrate this : A large 
complex object, having attributes too numerous to be represented 
at once, is yet tolerably well conceived by the union of several 
representations, each standing for part of its attributes. On think- 
ing of a piano, there first rises in imagination its outer appear- 
ance, to which are instantly added (though by separate mental 
acts) the ideas of its remote side and of its solid substance. A 
complete conception, however, involves the strings, the hammers. 



424 Mind and Matter 

the dampers, the pedals; and while successively adding these, 
the attributes first thought of lapse partially or wholly out of 
-consciousness. Nevertheless, the whole group constitutes a repre- 
sentation of the piano. Now as in this case we form a definite 
<3oncept of a special existence, by imposing limits and conditions in 
successive acts, so in the converse case, by taking away limits 
and conditions in successive acts, we form an indefinite notion 
of general existence. By fusing a series of states of conscious- 
ness, from each of which, as it arises, the limitations and condi- 
tions are abolished, there is produced a consciousness of something 
unconditioned. To speak more rigorously — this consciousness is 
not the abstract of any one group of thoughts, ideas, or concep- 
tions, but it is the abstract of all thoughts, ideas, or conceptions. 
That which is common to them all we predicate by the word 
' existence.' Dissociated as this becomes from each of its modes 
by the perpetual change of those modes, it remains as an indefinite 
consciousness of something constant under all modes — of being 
apart from its appearances. The distinction we feel between 
special and general existence is the distinction between that 
which is changeable in us and that which is unchangeable. The 
contrast between the Absolute and the Relative in our minds 
is really the contrast between that mental element which exists 
absolutely and those which exist relatively. 

" So that this ultimate mental element is at once necessarily 
indefinite and necessarily indestructible. Our consciousness of 
the unconditioned being literally the unconditioned consciousness, 
or raw material of thought to which in thinking we give definite 
forms, it follows that an ever present sense of real existence is 
the very basis of our intelligence. As we can in successive 
mental acts get rid of all particular conditions and replace them 
by others, but cannot get rid of that undifferentiated substance 
of consciousness which is conditioned anew in every thought, 
there ever remains with us a sense of that which exists persist- 
ently and independently of conditions. While by the laws of 
thought we are prevented from forming a conception of absolute 
existence, we are by the laws of thought prevented from excluding 
the consciousness of absolute existence; this consciousness being, 
as we here see, the obverse of self-consciousness. And since the 
measure of relative validity among our beliefs is the degree of 
their persistence in opposition to the efforts made to change them, 



f 



The World as Unperceived, mid the '' Unknotvable " 425 

it follows that this which persists at all times, under all circum- 
stances, has the highest validity of any. 

" The points in this somewhat too elaborate argument are 
these: In the very assertion that all knowledge, properly so 
called, is Relative, there is involved the assertion that there exists 
a Non-relative. In each step of the argument by which this doc- 
trine is established, the same assumption is made. From the 
necessity of thinking in relations, it follows that the Relative is 
itself inconceivable, except as related to a real Non-relative. 
Unless a real Non-relative or Absolute be postulated, the Rela- 
tive itself becomes absolute ; and so brings the argument to a 
contradiction. And on watching our thoughts, we have seen how 
impossible it is to get rid of the consciousness of an Actuality 
lying behind Appearances ; and how, from this impossibility, 
results our indestructible belief in that Actuality." 

Now, I have stated some pages back that the first objection to 
the Unknowable is that we have absolutely no foundation in our 
experience for the assumption of its existence. Is not that objec- 
tion answered here ? Surely every careful reader of the extract 
given above must see that the only Unknowable with which Mr. 
Spencer's argument is concerned is an internal Unknowable, a 
something which the man hopelessly wedded to the insanities of 
idealism may accept as frankly as Mr. Spencer. It is " an indefi- 
nite consciousness," "raw material of consciousness," an "indefi- 
nite thought," an " abstract of all thoughts, ideas, or conceptions." 
All doubts as to its nature should be set at rest by the unequivocal 
statement that " our consciousness of the unconditioned " is " liter- 
ally the unconditioned consciousness, or raw material of thought 
to which in thinking we give definite forms." It is this " undif- 
ferentiated substance of consciousness which is conditioned anew 
in every thought " that remains with us as an Absolute through 
all forms of the conditioned. 

This, then, is the Reality for which Mr. Spencer argues ! It is 
what is left when the differences which distinguish mental phe- 
nomena are cancelled — it is their common core. But this is not 
an external Reality. It cannot possibly extricate us from the per- 
plexities of the idealist and furnish us with a World. So palpably 
unequal is it to the task, that Mr. Spencer at once abandons it and 
turns to an Absolute, an external Reality, of a wholly different 
nature, with which the argument has no connection whatever. 



426 Mind and Matter 

This new Reality is assumed without any argument. It is not to 
be found in our experiences by a process of abstraction ; it lies 
hehind them. It is an Inscrutable Power whose nature transcends 
intuition and is beyond imagination. It seems absurd to speak 
thus of the raw material of thought. We may speak of the actions 
of this Unseen Reality ; it is an Unknown Cause which produces in 
us certain beliefs and thereby authorizes us to profess and act them 
out ; we must not in our thought degrade it, for it may have a 
mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will as these 
transcend mechanical motion. Manifestly, this cannot be written 
of a raw material whose very rawness is due to the fact that such 
distinctions as active and passive, cause and effect, higher and 
lower, have been completely abstracted from.^ 

We must not, then, think of the external reality which is to 
save us from the idealistic chaos as being the raw material of con- 
sciousness. It is something entirely different, and in another of 
his works Mr. Spencer expressly recognizes the fact. He says : 
" The postulate with which metaph3^sical reasoning sets out, is that 
we are primarily conscious only of our sensations — that we cer- 
tainly know we have these, and that if there be anything beyond 
these serving as cause for them, it can be known only by inference 
from them. 

" I shall give much surprise to the metaphysical reader if I call 
in question this postulate ; and the surprise will rise into astonish- 
ment if I distinctly deny it. Yet I must do this. Limiting the 
proposition to those epi-peripheral feelings produced in us by 
external objects (for these are alone in question), I see no 
alternative but to affirm that the thing primarily known is not 
that a sensation has been experienced, but that there exists an 
outer object." 2 

Thus we primarily know, not our sensation nor the raw ma- 
terial of our sensations, but a something beyond, — a something 
which produces them and their raw material. It is of no little 
importance to bear this in mind. As long as we regard our exter- 
nal Reality or our Absolute as no more than " an indefinite con- 
sciousness " or " an indefinite thought," its existence appears to 
have for us at least a semi-intelligibility. It is found in our expe- 
rience ; it is that mental element which all thoughts, ideas, or con- 

1 Mr. Spencer's catalogue of the attributes of his second Absolute fills Chapter V. 

2 'Trinciples of Psychology," Part VII, Chapter VI, § 404. 



The World as Unperceived, and the " Unhnowdble " 427 

ceptions have in common. But the external Keality which is 
beyond all thoughts, ideas, and conceptions is neither a definite 
nor an indefinite element in our experience. It does not exists in 
the sense in which such elements may be said to exist ; that is to 
say, it has no place in the circle of our experiences; it is not given 
as they are given. 

The Absolute contained in appearances, their common core, is a 
thing to be attained by a legitimate process of abstraction with 
which we are all familiar ; and when it is attained, it is a something 
to which it seems possible to point and of which it does not seem 
to be nonsense to speak — it is an indefinite thought. When one is 
discoursing of such a thing as this, speech has not become wholly 
without significance. There can, however, be no greater blunder 
than the transference of this significance to an Absolute which is 
not an indefinite thought, cannot be proved to exist as an indefinite 
thought can, and cannot hold in experience the place appropriate 
to an indefinite thought, whatever that place may be. 

it can hardly be gainsaid that Mr. Spencer, in confusing the 
two Absolutes, and in passing over without apology from the first 
to the second, has given to the statement that this latter Absolute 
exists something like a meaning. This meaning must carefully 
be denied to it. The reader must resolutely forget all that he has 
said in the long extract given above, for it has no bearing upon 
the case, and is wholly misleading. 

Nor must one carry over to this Absolute, as we have seen, any 
other distinctions which have their significance only within the 
realm of our experience. Mr. Spencer carries over a host of such. 
He conceives his external Reality as " lying behind appearances," 
or as " underlying appearances "; we have seen that the relation of 
the Unknowable to phenomena cannot possibly be that of reality 
to appearance. He calls it an Incomprehensible Power ; we call a 
thing a power when it has certain definite ear-marks ; that which 
can do nothing in any intelligible sense of the words is not a 
power. He speaks of its presence ; it is not present in conscious- 
ness, and it remains to show in what sense it can be present to any- 
thing. He makes it external ; it has no place in the outer world 
as it is revealed to us. He calls it a Reality ; it is impossible to 
show that it is real as are those things which we commonly 
call real and which we distinguish from things unreal. He calls 
it a Cause; it stands quite outside of any chain of causes and 



428 Mind and Matter 

effects of which science knows anything, and with which men of 
science ever think it worth while to occupy themselves. 

It is clear, then, that every gleam of meaning which Mr. Spencer 
allows to light up the darkness of the Unknowable, is a gleam which 
must logically be excluded. This he himself admits, for has he not 
informed us that we can only escape error by regarding every notion 
we frame of the Unknowable "as merely a symbol," while making 
it very plain that the symbol does not symbolize ? ^ Of course, this 
means, if it means anything, that when we call the Unknowable 
external, and a Power, a Cause and a Reality, we are quite as wide 
of the mark as though we were to call it internal, and an Impo- 
tence, an Effect and an Unreality. If words must be stripped of all 
meaning before we apply them to the Unknowable, there can be no 
good reason for employing one word rather than another when one 
describes it. We cannot find fault with the man who elects to call 
the thing an emotion, a button, or a cocked hat, if it is clearly under- 
stood that he is not supposed to mean what he appears to be saying. 

I must apologize to the reader for dwelling so long upon ^Ir. 
Spencer's doctrine. It has been criticised very often, and it is 
easy to criticise. But I am most anxious that it be clearly seen 
that a genuine and unadulterated Unknowable is really nothing at 
all. When one has washed it clean, there is no residue whatever. 
One cannot construct a world out of mental phenomena 'plus aii 
Unknowable,^ for in adding the latter one has added nothing to 
the mental phenomena. 

Thus we seem to be left sticking in the difficulty that embar- 
rassed us at the beginning of the chapter. We cannot say that 
the world as it really existed before the advent of sentient creatures 
was the Unknowable. We have no reason for saying this, and when 
we have said it, we have said nothing. Did a world exist at all ? 
Science and common sense say: Yes. But wdiat world? The 
world as described to us in touch-movement sensations, or rather, 
in elements which may be regarded as touch-movement sensations? 
a world appropriate to such a creature as man is ? How could such 
a world have existed when as yet the senses had not been developed 
that make touch-movement sensations possible? 

1 "First Principles," Tart T, Chapter V, § 31. 

2 I do not think it is necessary to comment upon the passages in which Mr. Spen- 
cer seems to hold to a phenomenal world beyond consciousness, e.g. Part I, Chapter 
III, § iri ; Part II, Chapter 11, § 44, and Chapter 111. 



The World as Unperceivedy and the " Unknowable " 429 

Let us go back a little ; and let us remember that words must 
not be used without a meaning. We have seen what real existence 
means. We must not get away from this meaning. Certain phe- 
nomena fall into what I have called the objective order. A con- 
sciousness of this order is a consciousness of the external world. A 
real external thing is a something having its place in this order. As 
having such a place it has real existence. 

This order is spread out in space and time; in other words, 
space and time are the plan of the system. A real thing may be 
now before me ; that is, it may have its place in the system at a 
point called the present. But it may just as well have its place at 
a very different point in the system ; that is, it may belong to the 
remote past. Its right to be called real does not derive from its 
being present here and now ; it derives from its having a place 
in the system. Hence, when I ask whether the world ever 
was as the geologist tells me it was before life appeared on 
this planet, I am asking whether the phenomena indicated in 
his description may really be accepted as belonging to the objec- 
tive order, whether they may legitimately be assigned a place in 
that series. 

Now, as we shall see in the next two chapters, we do not merely 
recognize an objective order, the external world, and a single sub- 
jective order which we recognize as our own mind. We recognize 
the existence of a multitude of other minds, past and present, re- 
lated to other bodies as our mind is related to our body. That is 
to say, we relate to various groups of phenomena in the objective 
order certain groups of phenomena not themselves in the objective 
order. 

We must not forget that it is to certain phenomena in the objective 
order that we seem justified by experience in relating our own and 
other minds. An Unknowable, a Thing-in-itself, a Noumenon, never 
enters into the question at all. And we must not forget that when 
we say: if our senses were different, the whole external world 
would be perceived to be different, we only mean that, given cer- 
tain changes in the objective order, the whole objective order would 
have to be transformed in harmony with those changes. 

The statement that, if our senses were different, the external 
world upon which we gaze would be perceived to be different, is 
not a statement made at random. It is a recognition of the fact 
that we can pass from the objective order in one form to the objec- 



430 Mind and Matter 

tive order in another form. The question may at once be raised : 
Is this the same objective order? Are we speaking of the same 
external world? But I ask the reader to remark the fact that we 
pass /rom the objective order in the one form to the objective order 
in another. We are not concerned with two disconnected worlds ; 
if we were, any such transition would be impossible. We remain 
always, if we reason soberly and talk sense, within the one system 
of phenomena. We pass from part to part of this system, not 
from one system to another independent of it ; if we choose, we 
may indicate this fact by saying that we pass, not from one 
external world to another, but from one aspect of the external 
world to another. 

When the man of science gives us an account of the world as 
it was before life appeared on this planet, he is carrying back for 
us the objective order upon which we gaze, and the elements 
which compose it throughout are not different from those in 
which the world presents itself to us now. If, however, his 
account is a good one — if it is true — and if it is ideally com- 
plete, we can, provided we are able to supplement it with an 
equally complete knowledge of the relations of the phenomena 
of the subjective order to those of the objective order (i.e. of the 
relations of our mind to our body), use the information he gives 
us as a foundation from which we may pass to the phenomena of 
the objective order and of the subjective order as they may be 
revealed in the experience of every possible creature. 

This statement will, I hope, become clearer to the reader when 
he has read the two chapters that follow this one. It amounts to 
saying that if we had an ideally perfect knowledge of the objective 
order and of the subjective order as they present themselves in our 
experience, and had an ideally perfect knowledge of their relations, 
we should have the key to a perfect knowledge of the external world 
in all its aspects and to the contents of all minds. In other words, 
we might know everything of which it means anything to say : it exists. 
That we fall pitiably short of this ideal, it is scarcely worth while 
to emphasize. 

Thus we see that, if the man of science does his work well, he 
is helping us to an objective order which will serve to unify and 
bring into a system all conceivable phenomena. His account of 
the world is not the only conceivable account of the world ; but it 
is as true as it is conceivable that any account of the world should 



The World as Unperceived, and the " Unknowable " 431 

be ; and from it every other possible account can, theoretically, at 
least, be deduced. 

Perhaps one will admit as much as this, and, nevertheless, feel 
disposed to complain. One may insist that such an account as I 
am discussing gives us, after all, not the external world as it is, but 
the external world as it is perceived, or might be perceived, by 
us — in other words, it gives us only our impressions of an external 
world, impressions from which we seem to be able to pass to other 
impressions appropriate to us or to other creatures. 

I answer : first, that " the external world as perceived by us " 
is by no means a thing to be confounded with " our impressions of 
an external world." In the first case, we are concerned with an 
objective order as objective, a something to which our own and 
other minds are referred and from which they are distinguished. 
In the second, we are concerned with a collection of phenomena 
referred to a particular mind. The two constructs are by no 
means identical, and they must not be interchanged. It is not 
absurd to say my mind is referred to a certain body in the external 
world perceived by me, and another mind is referred to another 
body in the same external world perceived by me. It is absurd to 
say my mind is referred to a certain group of impressions in my 
mind, and another mind is referred to another group of impressions 
in my mind. 

And I answer : second, it is a misapprehension to suppose that 
" the external world as it is " can be anything else than " the 
external world as it is perceived by me," or the external world as 
it is perceived by some other creature. Words must not be used 
without a meaning. What we mean by the expression " the 
external world " is a thing to be discovered by analysis. Analysis 
seems to reveal that it always means the objective order of experi- 
ence as contrasted with the subjective. As, however, there are no 
phenomena in the objective order which may not take their place 
in the subjective order and be contrasted with another objective, 
it is easy to fall into the error of supposing that all our experiences 
are subjective — which is absurd — and of feeling compelled to 
look for a something objective which cannot take its place in the 
subjective order under any circumstances. For those who seek 
such an "objective something" nothing remains but the Unknow- 
able, which is neither something nor objective^ in any intelligible 
sense of the words. 



432 Mind and Matter 

We come round, then, to the questions raised at the beginning 
of the chapter. Shall we maintain that the world existed in the 
remote past, and that it exists now when unperceived? Yes. 
Shall we admit that the man of science can tell us what it was and 
is like ? Certainly. To be sure, the question must be given a mean- 
ing, if it is to be regarded as worthy of an answer. When it is given 
a meaning, it is not difficult to find for it an answer. One must 
not make of it an absurd question, and ask, in effect : How does 
the world look to a creature that is not looking ? The philosopher 
can be better employed in some other way than in seeking the 
answer to such a question as this. 



PART IV 
OTHER MINDS, AND THE REALM OF MINDS 

CHAPTER XXVII 
THE EXISTENCE OF OTHER MINDS 

In the preceding chapters I have from time to time spoken of 
other minds as though every man had good reason to believe that 
other minds than his own existed, and as though he could under- 
stand what I meant when I referred to such. This I had a right 
to expect of him, for common thought accepts without question an 
external world and a realm of minds in relation to it; in a sense 
cut off from each other, it is true, and yet quite well aware of each 
other's existence. 

But just as it is possible to recognize the distinction between 
one's own mind and the external world, and to feel assured of the 
existence of both, without on that account being able to make 
clear what this distinction implies, so it is possible to recognize 
the existence of other minds without having a very clear conscious- 
ness of just what one means by these words, and without feeling 
able to defend before the bar of reason what seems to be one of the 
most natural beliefs in the world. 

It is a commonplace of literature that we arrive at a knowledge 
of the existence of other minds by a process of inference. That 
we are not conscious of the contents of other minds as we are con- 
scious of the contents of our own, every one is ready to admit. 
The only question seems to be as to the precise nature of the infer- 
ence, and as to its justification. We have seen that, to a man who 
remains upon the psychological standpoint, the existence of the 
external world must be matter of inference, and we have also seen 
that the inference is quite without justification. He has, by hypoth- 
esis, nothing but ideas to start with, and he can end with noth- 
ing but ideas, for there is nothing in his experience that can carry 

2f 433 



434 Other Minds , and the Recdm of Minds 

him from idea to thing. It seems fair to ask whether we have not 
something simiUir in the present case — whether, since we admit 
that we can never perceive directly what is in another mind, and 
cannot verify our inferences by observation, we must not also 
admit that our belief in the existence of other minds is a belief 
which cannot really be established by proofs ? If I could once 
observe a connection between certain experiences of my own and 
another mind — not infer it, but actually observe it — such an 
observed connection might furnish the ground for a multitude of 
inferences ; but in the absence of even a single observed fact, how 
can I proceed without being plagued by the consciousness that 
the whole fabric I am building up may be no more than my own 
dream ? 

John Stuart Mill thought that the existence of other minds 
could be proved^ and he has presented his argument in his usual 
clear and trenchant style. He writes : ^ — 

" By what evidence do I know, or by what considerations am I 
led to believe, that there exist other sentient creatures ; that the 
walking and speaking figures which I see and hear, have sensa- 
tions and thoughts, or, in other words, possess Minds ? The most 
strenuous Intuitionist does not include this among the things that 
I know by direct intuition. I conclude it from certain things, 
which my experience of my own states of feeling proves to me to 
be marks of it. These marks are of two kinds, antecedent and 
subsequent ; the previous conditions requisite for feeling, and the 
effects or consequences of it. I conclude that other human beings 
have feelings like me, because, first, they have bodies like me, 
which I know, in my own case, to be the antecedent condition of 
feelings ; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other 
outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be 
caused by feelings. I am conscious in myself of a series of facts 
connected by a uniform sequence, of which the beginning is modi- 
fications of my body, the middle is feelings, the end is outward 
demeanor. In the case of other human beings I have the evidence 
of my senses for the first and last links of the series, but not for 
the intermediate link. I find, however, that the sequence between 
the first and last is as regular and constant in those other cases as 
it is in mine. In my own case I know that the first link produces 
the last through the intermediate link, and could not produce it 
1 " Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," Chapter Xll. 



The Existence of Other Minds 435 

without. Experience, therefore, obliges me to conclude that there 
must be an intermediate link ; which must either be the same in 
others as in myself, or a different one. I must either believe them 
to be alive, or to be automatons; and by believing them to be 
alive, that is, by supposing the link to be of the same nature as in 
the case of which I have experience, and which is in all respects 
similar, I bring other human beings, as phenomena, under the same 
generalizations which I know by experience to be the true theory 
of my own existence. And in doing so I conform to the legiti- 
mate rules of experimental inquiry. The process is exactly 
parallel to that by which Newton proved that the force which 
keeps the planets in their orbits is identical with that by which an 
apple falls to the ground. It was not incumbent on Newton 
to prove the impossibility of its being any other force ; he was 
thought to have made out his point when he had simply shown 
that no other force need be supposed. We know the existence of 
other beings by generalization from the knowledge of our own; 
the generalization merely postulates that what experience shows 
to be a mark of the existence of something within the sphere of 
our consciousness, may be concluded to be a mark of the same 
thing beyond that sphere." 

In criticising another extract taken from MilP I have pointed 
out that he slurs over the distinction between the mind and the 
world by absorbing the world into the mind and identifying exter- 
nal objects with small and definite portions " of the series which, in 
its entireness, forms my conscious existence." When we bear in 
mind what human bodies must mean to him after he has done this, 
we cannot but be nonplussed by his argument for other minds. 
At first sight it does not seem unreasonable to say that I know by 
experience that my body is an antecedent condition of my feelings, 
and that motions of my body are effects or consequences of my 
feelings. It seems equally reasonable to maintain that, when I see 
another human body acted upon by something, and then observe a 
certain kind of reaction, I may argue by analogy to a link of feel- 
ings between the two. But let us remember that we are, for the 
moment, disciples of Mill, and let us scrutinize the two statements. 

May we really maintain that experience presents us with the 
chain of three links indicated by Mill ? Does experience reveal to 
me as standing in a certain relation of antecedence and consequence 

1 See Chapter XXIII. 



436 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

(1) my body, (2) my consciousness, and (3) changes in my body? 
I have discovered that my body and the changes in my body, or, 
to be a little more accurate, my body in one condition and my body 
in some other condition, are nothing more than definite groups of 
my feelings, i.e. parts of consciousness, and it seems absurd to 
interpolate my consciousness as a whole between them. In com- 
mon speech it would not be tolerated if the plain man said, " I 
perceive that all that I perceive is an intermediate link between 
two states of a thing that I perceive." The psychologist would 
frown upon the statement that the whole of a man's consciousness 
is perceived by him to be an intermediate link between two of his 
percepts. It is no whit more sensible for the metaphysician to say 
such things than it is for another man ; and when he finds that he 
has said such a thing, it only remains for him to retract it. 

Thus we see that, in turning the external world into " feel- 
ings," Mill has lost the first and the last of the three links, furnished 
by experience, which are to make possible an analogical argument 
which will result in other minds. It is the old story of the tele- 
phone exchange absorbed by the clerk. He cannot discover him- 
self to be an intermediate link between two wires, when both the 
wires are discovered to be in him. And this absorption of the 
telephone exchange is as fatal to the notion of subscribers as it is 
to that of wires. If I stand at one end of a wire, and a subscriber 
stands at the other end of the same wire, the relation between us 
is a conceivable one. We are at least in the one world. But if 
each has a world to himself — a world with its own space and time, 
a world wholly disconnected with every other — it seems absurd 
to speak of relations between such, and to attempt to pass in any 
sense of the word from one such world to another. 

Now we must not forget that, to the disciple of Mill, everything 
that I can perceive must take its place among my feelings. More- 
over, we must remember that "the particular series of feelings 
which constitutes my own life is confined to myself; no other 
sentient being shares it with me." This means that no one of 
the things that I can perceive is in his world, and no one of the 
things that he can perceive is in mine. His body is my percept; 
the changes in his body are my percepts. Sliall I j^lace as an 
intermediate link between two of my percepts his consciousness, 
a consciousness similar to my own? This means that between two 
states of a small object in the world I perceive, I am to place as an 



The Existence of Other Minds 437 

intermediate link a whole world like the one I perceive. What 
does it mean to place such a world between the two ? Simply 
nothing at all. As well try to patch the space I know with a space 
admittedly discontinuous with it. 

It may be objected that this interpolation must at least not be 
conceived to be of a material sort ; that Mill is not talking about 
material things, but about feelings. I answer, It is not easy to 
distinguish between the two, when one has turned material things 
into feelings. But the objection has, at least, so much weight ; 
the world interpolated is not to become a part of the world in 
which it is to play the role of an intermediate link. This I have 
recognized in the above illustration, in remarking that the new 
space which is to be made an intermediate link between two parts 
of the old is discontinuous with the old. One may move in every 
direction through the old without anywhere meeting it. It seems 
quite fair in such a case to ask what is meant by calling it an 
intermediate link ; and it seems quite clear that one must accept 
the echo of one's question for an answer. 

But if it is desired to avoid such words as " world " and 
" object," and to speak only of " feelings " and " states of conscious- 
ness," I have no objection to the change. I insist, however, that 
the interjection of the intermediate link remains as mere a form 
of words as before. That another man's mind should be an 
intermediate link between two groups of my feelings can seem to 
be a satisfactory statement only to the man to whom strings of 
vocables seem precious in themselves considered. What does it 
mean to be such an intermediate link ? My feelings as a whole 
are absolutely cut off from the feelings of another man ; his feelings 
as a whole are absolutely cut off from mine. What can I mean by 
a link that is absolutely cut off from the things it is supposed to 
link? The sentence appears to be mere noise. And if one is 
tempted to drop the word " link," and say, instead, certain changes 
in my feelings " reveal the presence " of another consciousness, I 
ask : What can one possibly mean by the word " presence " in 
such a connection ? In what sense can the new space be said to 
be present to some part of the old, when it has been declared 
discontinuous with it? I may be permitted the figure, for the 
analogy is a close one. 

The difficulty of conceiving the relation between two conscious- 
nesses was much more vividly perceived by Clifford than it was by 



438 Other Minds, and the Recdm of Minds 

^Nlill, and it stares us very directly in the face in his doctrine of 
ejects. He writes as follows : ^ — 

"The inferences of physical science are all inferences of my 
real or possible feelings ; inferences of something actually or poten- 
tially in my consciousness, not of anything outside of it. 

" There are, however, some inferences which are profoundly 
different from those of physical science. When I come to the 
conclusion that you are conscious, and that there are objects in 
your consciousness similar to those in mine, I am not inferring any 
actual or possible feelings of my own, but your feelings, which are 
not, and cannot by any possibility become, objects in my conscious- 
ness. The complicated processes of your body and the motions of 
your brain and nervous system, inferred from evidence of anatom- 
ical researches, are all inferred as things possibly visible to me. 
However remote the inference of physical science, the thing 
inferred is always a part of me, a possible set of changes in my 
consciousness bound up in the objective order with other known 
changes. But the inferred existence of your feelings, of objective 
groupings among them similar to those among my feelings, and of 
a subjective order in many respects analogous to my own, — these 
inferred existences are in the very act of inference thrown out of 
my consciousness, recognized as outside of it, as not being a part 
of me. I propose, accordingly, to call these inferred existences 
ejects^ things thrown out of my consciousness, to distinguish them 
from objects^ things presented in my consciousness, phenomena. 
It is to be noticed that there is a set of changes of my conscious- 
ness symbolic of the eject, which may be called my conception of 
you ; it is (I think) a rough picture of the whole aggregate of my 
consciousness, under imagined circumstances like yours ; qud group 
of my feelings, this conception is like the object in substance and 
constitution, but differs from it in implying the existence of some- 
thing that is not itself, but corresponds to it, namely, of the eject. 
The existence of the object, whether perceived or inferred, carries 
with it a group of beliefs ; these are always beliefs in the future 
sequence of certain of my feelings. The existence of this table, 
for example, as an object in my consciousness, carries with it the 
belief that if I climb up on it I shall be able to walk about on it 
as if it were the ground. But the existence of my conception of 
you in my consciousness carries with it a belief in the existence of 
1 "On the Nature of Things-in-Tliemselvcs." 



The Existence of Other Minds 439 

you outside of my consciousness, a belief which can never be 
expressed in terms of the future sequence of my feelings. How 
this inference is justified, how consciousness can testify to the 
existence of anything outside of itself, I do not pretend to say : I 
need not untie a knot which the world has cut for me long ago. 
It may very well be that I myself am the only existence, but it is 
simply ridiculous to suppose that anybody else is. The position 
of absolute idealism may, therefore, be left out of count, although 
each individual may be unable to justify his dissent from it. " 

In this passage much emphasis is laid upon the fact, also 
insisted upon by Mill, that the whole world perceived or perceiv- 
able by me must be regarded as nothing else than " my feelings." 
The distinction between my feelings and the feelings of another is 
made so clear that it is impossible to obliterate it — the gulf is 
made impassable. It is, therefore, but natural that Clifford should 
recognize that he cannot logically bridge it. I cannot step from 
my body to my consciousness and from that to my body again, and, 
with the impetus thus acquired, step from the body of another man 
to his consciousness and then to his body, as Mill would have me. 
Both my body and his body are phenomena in my consciousness, 
and when I make an attempt to step out of my consciousness, I 
find that I do not know even how to begin. It is precisely as 
though I were to attempt to step, from the space in which I live 
and move, into another space which can form no part of the space 
which lies around me. In what direction shall I step ? Evidently, 
in none ; for every direction leads to more space of just the kind 
that I am not seeking. Yet I must step in some direction, for a 
step that is not in any direction cannot by the extremest stretch of 
courtesy be called a step at all. And just as little can an inference 
that is both groundless and meaningless be called an inference. 

It is odd that Clifford, having declared his gulf impassable, 
should remark that we need not worry over difficulties that lie 
behind us, and may content ourselves with the reflection that we 
all passed over this gulf long ago. This is a return to com- 
mon sense with a vengeance, and would, if consistently adhered 
to, make short work of the reasonings of the philosophers. The 
Zenonic puzzles touching the infinite divisibility of space would 
disappear like magic. Does not every one know that spaces are 
passed over and that minutes come to an end? The external 
world would be rehabilitated. Does not everv one know that 



440 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

chairs and tables are not feelings and cannot by any sane man be 
mistaken for feelings? The men who rashly declare that minds 
are the only realities would be roughly put in their place — 
among them Clifford, whose doctrine of things-in-themselves 
would be unable to obtain even a hearing. 

It seems as odd that, after finding the gulf impassable, Clif- 
ford should have fallen back in the same essay upon the bridge 
approved by Mill, and have elaborated an argument for passing 
from minds to bodies and from bodies to minds, even formulating 
a rule-of-three method of discovering the exact contents of other 
minds. ^ That he did so simply shows that men are impelled, when 
they find that the logical consequences of their doctrines are re- 
pellent to common sense, to repudiate those consequences whether 
they can find a justification for doing so or whether they cannot. 
By hook or by crook Descartes and Locke were determined to hold 
on to an external world ; by hook or by crook Clifford was deter- 
mined not to be a solipsist, the sole inhabitant of a solitary world — 
perhaps I would better say, was determined not to he that solitary 
world. To all three it seemed absurd to act otherwise. 

And, indeed, solipsism does seem an absurdity unworthy of a 
serious mind. The dreary situation of the man who believes him- 
self to be his own and sole universe has been pictured in character- 
istic style by Jean Paul Richter : — 

" The very worst of it all is the lazy, aimless, aristocratic, insu- 
lar life that a god must lead ; he has no one to go with. If I am 
not to sit still for all time and eternity, if I let myself down as well 
as I can and make myself finite, that I may have something in the 
way of society, still I have, like petty princes, only my own crea- 
tures to echo my words. . . . Every being, even the highest Being, 
wishes something to love and to honor. But the Fichtean doctrine 
that I am my own body-maker leaves me with nothing whatever — 
with not so much as the beggar's dog or the prisoner's spider. . . . 
Truly I wish that there were men, and that I was one of them. . . . 
If there exists, as I very much fear, no one but myself, unlucky 
dog that I am, then there is no one at such a pass as I. The only 
enthusiasm left me is logical enthusiasm — all my metaphysics, 
chemistry, technology, nosology, botany, entomology, are summed 
up in the old adage : Know Thyself. I am not merely, as Bellar- 
min says, my own Saviour, but also my own Devil, Executioner, 
1 I liavo discussed this at length in Chapter XXI. 



I 



The Existence of Other Minds 441 

and Master of the Knout. . . . Around me stretches humanity- 
turned to stone. In the gloomy uninhabited void glows no love, 
no admiration, no prayer, no hope, no aim. I am so wholly alone ; 
nowhere a heart-beat ; no life, nothing, about me ; and without me 
nothing but nothing. . . . Who hears my wail, and who knows 
me now ? Ego. Who will hear it, and who will know me to all 
eternity ? Ego." ^ 

Richter's eloquence is, to be sure, too generous to the solipsist, 
for he who has become the whole universe cannot in decency speak 
of humanity as around him turned to stone. There is no " around 
him " — the words are nonsense. Nor can he desire to associate 
with any one else. It is mere absurdity to speak of one universe 
as associating with another. How shall they begin their billing 
and cooing when they have not even the same space and time ? 
Evidently the solipsist is a man who declares himself to be the 
universe, without wholly letting go the old common-sense notion 
of selves as things belonging to the one universe, and capable of 
standing in some sort of relation to each other. From a philosoph- 
ical point of view, it would have been better had Jean Paul not 
attempted to prove the solipsist a miserable creature, but rather 
had he pointed out that he is a logical absurdity, an impossible 
creature, one who has no right to be an " ipsist " at all. 

Richter grants the solipsist too much, and in granting it he 
appears to admit that the existence of other minds is not precisely 
a thing to be proved, but rather a postulate. It has seemed to 
many acute minds that it is not precisely a thing to be proved. 
Sometimes one meets with the explicit admission that, although 
it is not a thing to be proved, yet we are justified in assuming it 
as the result of an argument from analogy — a position which sets 
one to wondering what we are to understand by the use of the 
word "justified. " " It must be premised," writes Professor Huxley, 
" that it is wholly impossible absolutely to prove the presence or 
absence of consciousness in anything but one's own brain, though 
by analogy, we are justified in assuming its existence in other 
men." 2 

The analogical argument which is to furnish this justification 
is the argument set forth by Mill — we have body, mind, and body, 
in our own case ; and we assume the chain, body, mind, body, in 

1 " Werke," ed. Keimer, Berlin, 1827, Bd. XXX, ss. 65-68. 

2 " Collected Essays," N. Y., 1902, Vol. I, p. 219. 



442 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

the case of others. The argument for other minds always does 
€ome back to this, no matter who employs it, or how small his right 
to employ it may be. It is the argument of Berkeley, of Mill, of 
Clifford, of Huxley; and yet no one of these men had the least 
right to it, for no one of them could pass from body to conscious- 
ness, and from consciousness to body, after absorbing the body into 
the consciousness. That they all clung to it in spite of their philo- 
sophical opinions, clung to it as tenaciously as the plain man clings 
to his belief that minds are revealed by bodies, and that a body 
which acts as does his own reveals a mind like his own, suggests 
that there may be more in the argument than they seem to have 
gotten out of it. 

And, indeed, there is more in the argument. The idealist 
spoils it by reducing his chain of three links to one. As he turns 
all things into the mind, there remains nothing to which he can 
relate his own mind or any other. If we avoid this error, and if 
we interpret the argument aright, there is no reason why we should 
repudiate it. It is nothing more than an explicit statement of an 
inference implicitly recognized as reasonable by the plain man 
every day of his life ; and recognized as reasonable by no arbitrary 
act of volition, but seen to be justified by experience in an intelli- 
gible sense of the word. 

The plain man does not suppose the material world upon which 
he gazes to be in his mind. On the contrary, he supposes his mind 
to be in the world, although, as we have seen, it will not do to ask 
him too many questions about the precise meaning of this " in." 
He believes that he can pass from the Avorld to his mind and from 
his mind to the world, as, indeed, he can. And as he conceives 
his mind to be in the world — in a definite part of the world, his 
body — so he conceives other minds to be in the world, i.e. to be 
in other bodies. Minds are all about him ; they are not banished 
to separate universes, but form one community. He admits that 
he cannot directly perceive another mind, but he thinks he can 
locate it in an indefinite sort of a way, at least; and he never 
dreams of thinking that he stands alone. 

If we will examine the argument of Mill, or of any other 
idealist who has fairly faced this problem, we shall see that he, too, 
falls back upon the external world as does the plain man. In the 
same passage in which Mill tells me tliat my notion of myself " in- 
c'hulcs all possibilities of sensation, definite or indefinite, certified 



The Existence of Other Minds 443 

by experience or not, which I may imagine inserted in the series of 
my actual and conscious states," he also informs me that " the 
Possibilities of Sensation which are called outward objects, are 
possibilities of it to other beings as well as to me." How is it pos- 
sible that a part of my mind should also be a part of another mind ? 
Is not the series of feelings which constitutes my own life confined 
to myself ? Can I perceive directly even a part of another mind ? 
It seems very clear that the " outward objects " thus recognized by 
Mill must be something distinct from feelings simply. Feelings 
as feelings are never shared ; they are felt by one, and inferred by 
another. This Mill has clearly recognized ; he ought in consist- 
ency to acknowledge explicitly, as he has acknowledged implicitly, 
that the external objects among which the body is to be classed are 
not feelings. 

The truth is, that such writers as Mill and Clifford give no un- 
equivocal recognition to the objective order of experience, although 
it is abundantly evident that they are forced to give it an involun- 
tary and more or less ambiguous recognition. To declare that the 
things with which physical science concerns itself are " always a 
part of me " is to deny such an order altogether. It is to recognize 
only the subjective order. But if we will recognize only one side 
of a door, we must admit that the thing we recognize cannot be 
recognized as one side of a door. We must smuggle in the other, 
somehow, in order to keep the side we have the thing it is. It is 
this that is done by Pearson, when he finds a sufficiency of mystery 
in the universe of sensation which contains " little corners of con- 
sciousness." 1 This universe of sensation is the external world, the 
objective order, grudgingly acknowledged to be external and ob- 
jective ; and the corners of consciousness are minds. If we will 
unequivocally deny the universe of sensation, our corners will cease 
to be corners, i.e. to be minds. They will have none of the ear- 
marks by which a mind is known to be such. 

But if we will frankly recognize the objective order, we need 
not fall into such embarrassments, nor will it seem inconceivable 
that there should be a realm of minds. The plain man distin- 
guishes between the world, his own mind, and other minds. To 
deny the existence of any one of these seems to him to be insane. 
This is not the opinion of a man here and there ; it is the opinion 
of the race. Science recognizes it as justifiable ; the physical sci- 

1 See Chapter XXII. 



444 Other JIutds, and tJie Realm of Minds 

ences occupy themselves with the world of matter, and never sup- 
pose that their inferences have anything to do with your feelings 
or mine ; the science of psychology does suppose itself to be con- 
cerned with your feelings and mine, even with the objective order 
as revealed in our consciousness^ and does not regard itself as tres- 
passing upon the field of physical science. These distinctions it is 
surely not the duty of the metaphysician to obliterate. It is his 
business to analyze such conceptions as " the external world," " my 
mind," and " other minds." If the result of his efforts is a chaos 
in which they all disappear, he should admit that there is more 
sense in common sense than there is in his metaphysics, and he 
should take a fresh sheet and begin again. 

Now, we have seen that the distinction recognized by the plain 
man between his mind and the external world is a perfectly just 
distinction. It is a recognition of the subjective order of experi- 
ence and of the objective order. Neither his mind nor the exter- 
nal world is arbitrarily assumed by him to exist. Both are given, 
i.e. there are experiences which arrange themselves in the two 
orders, and the one order is not more immediately given than the 
other. 

We have also seen that the plain man is not wholly in the 
wrong in maintaining that his mind is in his body. He is apt to 
take this in too literally, but in speaking as he does he is recogniz- 
ing the fact that it is the reference to his body that marks the 
phenomena of the subjective order, and distinguishes them from 
those of the objective. It is precisely this distinction that is ad- 
mitted by Mill when he speaks of passing from body to conscious- 
ness and from consciousness back to body. He is recognizing an 
objective order and a subjective order, and is recognizing, too, that 
the body is, so to speak, their point of contact. 

But it is of the highest importance not to confuse the phenom- 
ena of the two orders even for a moment. One must never forget 
that a percept of the body is not the body, and that the body is 
never a percept. Hence the man who speaks of passing from body 
to mind and from mind to body again, i.e. the man who is endeav- 
oring explicitly to recognize both orders and their relation, must 
never admit that in passing from body to mind and from mind to 
body he is remaining within the charmed circle of Himself. To 
say this is to deny that there are two orders. His consciousness^ or 
himself y is a thing made up of percepts and various other mental 



The Existence of Other Minds ' 445 

phenomena ; it is perceived to be related to a body, and through 
that body to a whole world of other material things, but it contains 
no material thing whatever. Its relation to the body is, as we 
have seen, conveniently symbolized by the psychologist under the 
figure of parallelism : it is the halo and the body is the saint. To 
speak of the halo as containing this saint and all others is nonsense. 
No halo can do this and still be a halo. 

There is, then, an external world, and it contains a great many 
saints. Shall our plain man grant to each of them a halo, or shall 
he maintain that he alone is thus crowned, and that all the rest go 
bare-headed ? It should be observed that, in asking him to crown 
them all we are not asking him to perform an inconceivable feat. 
Of course, if the whole external world is assumed to be a part of 
his mind, he cannot relegate his mind to this part of the external 
world and another mind to that part. If all saints really are in 
his halo, it is absurd to speak of allowing them similar halos of 
their own. But since such an assumption is palpably absurd, and 
since there really are many saints, why not grant to each his halo ? 
It cannot be maintained that the relation of body and mind is 
an inconceivable one ; for the relation of one mind to one body is 
given in experience, and it is quite conceivable that a similar rela- 
tion should hold between other minds and other bodies. One may 
fall back upon the figure employed by the parallelist, and conceive 
of a whole series of halos as related to a whole series of bodies, 
and as, through these bodies, related to each other. 

Perhaps it will be admitted that this is a perfectly thinkable 
scheme — that the construction is not an impossible one — and 
will, nevertheless, be maintained that the existence of these other 
minds can never be proved. Mill appears to arrive at his conclu- 
sion, notwithstanding his avowed separation of minds from each 
other, and notwithstanding his denial of a world properly external, 
by putting minds very literally into the one world, and by making 
them parts of it much as though they were material things. He 
passes from body, as antecedent, to consciousness as a consequence ; 
and from consciousness as a condition, to bodily motions as its 
effects. The mind is thus recognized as a link in a series of 
causes and effects. 

But when one has recognized that mind must not be material- 
ized, and has adopted the parallelistic scheme, must one not abandon 
this argument ? For example, I stand opposite another man's body ; 



446 Otlier Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

it is at rest ; I stick a pin into it ; it turns about and protests vehe- 
mently. If I recognize the universe of matter to be a perfect 
mechanism, must I not admit that the whole reaction which I sum 
up as his protest is susceptible of a purely mechanical explanation ? 
The dilated chest, the clenched fist, the flashing eye, the quivering 
nostril, the interrupted breath which sends its message to my ear as 
articulate speech — are not all these the effects of motions in mat- 
ter, and of nothing else ? From pin-point to profanity there is an 
unbroken path, from which I wander merely through ignorance. 
At what point in such a series of causes and effects can I interject 
a mind? A mind can have no place in such a series. Why, then, 
assume a mind at all ? 

One need not, however, throw away Mill's argument merely 
because it has taken a materialistic turn. Its force lies in allow- 
ing to other bodies minds related to them as ive conceive our own 
mind to he related to our body. If he has misconceived this rela- 
tion, we should correct the misconception, and hold to what is 
good in his argument. 

If I regard the material world as a perfect mechanism, and 
employ the figure of parallelism to symbolize the relation of mind 
to body, I must, of course, admit that no bodily movement, no 
word, and no gesture of the man at whom I am looking, can be 
referred to his mind as an effect is referred to its cause. But if I 
hold this position, consistency compels me to admit that my own 
words and gestures are equally the result of mechanical causes, 
and that no one of them can be referred to my own mind as its 
effect. This does not in the least compel me to deny that tliere is 
a subjective order of experience and an objective order. It means 
merely that I hold carefully to the distinction between the two, 
and do not obliterate it by heedlessly making the subjective order 
a part of the objective — by putting my mind into my body in a 
material way. My mind and my body are given in experience, and 
their observed relations are symbolized in the statement that my 
mind is parallel to my body, and is not a thing in interaction 
with it. 

Now I have already pointed out that the parallelist is a man 
of robust faith. He speaks of a point-for-point correspondence 
between mind and brain, and he really knows scarcely anything of 
what takes place in his brain when he is having this or that mental 
experience. Of the two parallels, the mental one is vastly the 



The Existence of Other Minds 447 

better known, unsatisfactory as may be our knowledge even of 
that one. I may be the most ardent parallelist, and yet, when 
I come to explain my actions, I may pass over in silence the 
cerebral changes which I believe to correspond to my mental 
states. 

I have boxed a man's ears ; why did I do it ? He called me 
a fool ; that was exasperating, to begin with. Then I called to 
mind the fact that he was guilty of this indiscretion once before, 
and that on various other occasions he had given expression to his 
contempt for my person in an unmistakable way. It is to these 
things that I refer in accounting for my violence. Parallelist or 
not, I cannot point out the particular cerebral disturbances which 
were the mechanical antecedents of my action, for I have not the 
faintest idea how they differ from the cerebral disturbances which 
would have led me to fall on his neck and forgive him. My 
attention is taken up, as it must be, with my percepts, memories, 
and emotions, and not with my bodily mechanism. 

And just as I can use the contents of my mind as a bridge to 
pass from words which reach my ear to the movement of my arm, 
so I can and do connect by a similar bridge certain changes 
brought about in another man's body with certain other changes 
analogous to what I recognize in my own case to be purposeful 
movements. In neither case need I regard the bridge as literally 
a part of the mechanical series. We have seen that it is nonsense 
to do so. But it cannot be denied that the recognition of such 
bridges serves to explain, in an intelligible sense of the word, the 
actions of other men. They are assimilated to actions of our own ; 
by casting about in our own minds we can see that something, not 
evidently a factor in the occurrence, must be assumed to be present 
and to be determinative of the result. A boy has received forty 
strokes instead of ten ; the punishment seems to us severe ; we 
discover that his father knows it to be his second offence. The 
physical basis of this bit of information must lie hidden from us ; 
but when we have recognized the bit of information as present in 
the father's mind, we regard the augmentation of the punishment 
as explained. A fact which seemed to stand alone has been classed 
with other facts, and it no longer strikes us as surprising. 

It may be admitted that, in the present state of our knowledge, 
it would be absurd to sweep away all such bridges ; and it may be 
insisted, nevertheless, that if human bodies came to be far more 



448 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

perfectly known than they are, it would be possible to describe 
and explain all the actions of which they are capable, without 
once referring to human minds. To those who speak thus we 
must concede the fact that it would undoubtedly be possible to 
give to every one of them a mechanical explanation. 

But, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter,^ to do no 
more than this is to ignore so much of our world, that it may 
almost be regarded as the annihilation of our world. The material 
world is, to be sure, the very rock upon which the orderly system 
of experience rests. If it be ignored, we have a chaos, not a cos- 
mos ; and in the general ruin I cannot even save my mind^ for, as 
my mind, it disappears with the rest. This has been made suffi- 
ciently evident in chapters preceding. But it is no less true that 
the material world is not the whole of experience. Its importance, 
as that which orders experience as a whole, cannot be overrated ; 
but to drop quietly out of sight all that it serves to order is surely 
absurd. As well might some enthusiast insist that we should fix 
our attention exclusively upon our system of weights and meas- 
ures, and should make no mention of those things that men are 
interested in weighing and measuring. 

The world in which all men are interested is a world of minds 
related to each other through bodies, and it seems inconceivable 
that any extension of our knowledge should destroy this interest 
and turn us into mere mechanisms. The changes which take place 
in our brains are, in themselves considered, no more interesting or 
important than the changes which take place in so many rotting 
apples. It is as indicative of the presence of minds that they 
acquire their unique significance. It is not sensible to suppose 
that as I grow wiser I shall lose an interest in all save molecular 
changes, and shall outgrow the habit of thinking of myself and of 
other men as loving and hating, enjoying and suffering, feeling and 
knowing. Our world will always remain a world of minds, and 
a martyr will continue to be to us something more than roast 
meat. 

Doubtless it will here be objected that, admitting all this, the 
real existence of other minds remains unproven. Granted that I 
can make a distinction between my mind and an external world ; 
granted that I can connect my mind with a particular body in the 
external world ; granted that I am irresistibly impelled to interpret 

1 See Chapter XVI. 



The Existence of Other Minds 449 

the actions of other bodies after the analogy of my own, and to 
assume minds related to these bodies as my mind is related to my 
body ; does it not remain true, nevertheless, that verification of 
such an inference is out of the question, and that it is always possi- 
ble to maintain that I may be deceived in making it? How shall 
the inference be justified ? 

The question is as to the " real existence " of other minds : 
that I think they exist I cannot doubt ; but do they really exist ? 
Can I prove it? And what can it mean to prove it? Let us 
begin our investigation with the proof of the real existence of some 
material thing. 

Here is the desk before me ; does it really exist ? Undoubtedly. 
I maintain that no proof of its real existence is necessary, for the 
desk is known immediately. But am I certain that it is a real 
desk, and that I am not laboring under an hallucination? It 
becomes evident that in calling the thing a real desk I am placing 
it in a certain order of experiences, and if its real existence as a 
material thing is called in question, I must satisfy myself that it 
does belong in that order. Still, I am in the habit of claiming that 
I know the desk immediately, for no other proof than this is de- 
manded of its real existence, and it is at least as immediately known 
as any other thing. But it is not so with my neighbor's desk. I 
have never been in his house. He says that he sits at his desk for 
several hours daily, and in my mind's eye I picture him as seated 
before such a bit of furniture. Shall I believe that he really has a 
desk and really sits at it ? 

He says so, and I am inclined to accept his statement as justifi- 
cation of my belief in the fact. I have often noticed that when he 
and other men have declared things unperceived by me to exist, I 
have later been able to verify their statements. For a knowledge 
at second hand, I have been able to substitute a knowledge at first 
hand. If what the man says is true, it is possible for me to prove it 
true ; and if I can think of any reason why he might be inclined to 
deceive me, I suspend judgment until verification becomes possible. 
If his desk really exists, it is a part of a system of things every 
part of which can (theoretically) be as directly revealed to me as is 
this desk before me. To assign to it real existence is to allow it a 
place in this system, and it is always possible to verify its existence, 
to justify my belief in its existence, by a direct or indirect appeal 
to such an experience as I have when I sit opposite my own desk. 
2g 



450 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

Every really existent material thing can have its existence verified 
after this fashion. 

Absolute proof of the existence of such a thing as a desk seems, 
then, to mean nothing else than as direct a knowledge of it as it is 
conceivable that I should have. Now it does not require extraor- 
dinary perspicacity to see that, when Clifford maintains that the 
assumption of the existence of other minds cannot be justified, and 
when Huxley declares that their existence cannot be absolutely 
proved, they have in mind a justification and a proof of precisely 
this description. When we recognize this to be the case, we must 
unhesitatingly agree with their statements. It is absolutely impos- 
sible that another mind should be revealed to me as this desk is. 
Could it he so revealed^ it would not he another mind. It would be 
a material thing. To ask for proof of the existence of another 
mind, in this sense of the word " proof," is mere nonsense ; it amounts 
to asking that another mind be shown to be, not another mind, but 
a material thing. For a material thing really to exist, it is neces- 
sary that it should have its place in the orderly system that we call 
the external world ; it is inconceivable that, if other minds exist, 
they should exist after this fashion, and be proved to exist as such 
things are proved to exist. 

It is equally inconceivable that they should be proved not to 
exist as material things are proved not to exist. I may take 
advantage of the absence of my neighbor, and inspect his rooms. 
The desk is not there. But how shall I take advantage of him 
and prove by direct inspection the non-existence of the " eject " which 
I call his mind? The fact is, that the words "proof" and "dis- 
proof," in the sense under discussion, have no meaning as applied 
to the existence of other minds. If, then, we sa}^ that the exist- 
ence of another mind cannot absolutely be proved, and hold as our 
standard of proof the one set forth above, we are stating no truth 
that is worth putting into words. Of course it cannot be proved. 
It is trivial to insist that "ejects" are not to be confounded with 
" objects," and then to announce the discovery that " ejects " can- 
not be shown to be " objects." 

In so far as Huxley and Clifford say no more than this, we 
may agree with them, and yet feel that we have made no step in 
advance. But in so far as they may mean to imply by their 
words, that the existence of other minds cannot be proved in an}' 
sense of the word, and is, hence, a legitimate subject of doubt, 
wc have a right to enter an objection. 



The Existence of Other Minds 451 

We may point out that each of them admits, explicitly or 
implicitly, that he is justified in assumiijg that other minds exist. 
Huxley denies an absolute proof, but thinks we are justified "by 
analogy " in connecting consciousness with other men's brains. 
Can this mean that the existence of another man's mind is some- 
what uncertainly proved in the same way that the existence of a 
planet, as yet perceived by no one, is uncertainly proved from the 
aberrations of other heavenly bodies by a man who is not quite 
certain of his data ? Not at all. Uncertain proofs of this kind are 
not to be distinguished in kind from absolute proofs. Verification 
is always theoretically possible, and may come at any time. The 
analogy to which Huxley appeals does not stand in the same 
class. It is impossible that we should substitute for it the abso- 
lute proof which he distinguishes from it, whatever the extension 
of our knowledge. 

And although Clifford denies that our inference as to the 
existence of other minds is justified, he admits that the world 
has discovered a proof of its own which makes it unnecessary for 
him to furnish one. He does not disapprove of its having cut the 
knot. He accepts its conclusions, and makes of them a decidedly 
dogmatic use. 

It is worth remarking that in neither case is the assumption of 
the existence of other minds frankly admitted to be a purely arbi- 
trary and unreasonable assumption — one made for no reason at all, 
save that the writer chose to make it. Were it really as unreason- 
able as this, no one would take it seriously. The mere fact that 
it is made by a man of science in a work intended to be read by 
sane persons of mature mind, and that it is in such a work made 
the basis of a general scheme of things, is enough to prove that 
the writer felt himself justified, in some proper sense of the word, 
in making it. 

That the assumption can be justified, and the existence of 
other minds proved with a greater or less degree of certainty is 
certainly the common opinion of mankind. That their existence 
cannot be proved in the sense in which the existence of a planet 
can be proved seems perfectly evident. In what sense of the 
word, then, can it be proved? 

To answer this question one has only to turn to an examination 
of the sort of evidence which is always adduced for the existence 
of other minds. This evidence I have presented and discussed at 



452 Other Minds , and tlie Realm of Alinds 

lengtli ill this chapter. Where it is lacking, we assert that we 
have no reason to infer the existence of another mind ; where 
it is ambiguous, we admit that we are making an uncertain infer- 
ence ; where it is unmistakable, we affirm with confidence that 
another mind exists. The existence of another mind would be 
absolutely proved^ in the only sense of the word in which it means 
anything at all to prove absolutely the existence of another mind,^ 
if the evidence in question were ideally perfect. The possibility^ 
the probability^ the certainty of the existence of another mind, are 
words which have no meaning except what they gain from a refer- 
ence to the evidence under discussion ; and a doubt as to the pos- 
sibility, the probability, or the certainty of the existence of another 
mind can only be justified by a reference to the same evidence. 

This being the case, it is clear that it is a grave inconsistency 
for a man to refuse to recognize this evidence as furnishing a 
proof of existence, and to maintain that, although other minds 
may exist, we can never know it with certainty. What can it 
mean for him to say that other minds may exist ? Can it mean 
that they may^ conceivably, be directly perceived, as material 
things may be, but that it is uncertain that the evidence in hand 
justifies us in assuming that they really are to be put in this class? 
We have seen that this is absurd. We say that some material 
things do exist, and we say that some may exist. When we make 
the latter statement we mean that the sort of evidence which 
establishes the existence of material things is present in scant 
measure. But when we say that other minds may exist, we cannot 
refer to the insufficiency of evidence of this sort, for no possible 
degree of evidence of this sort can have any bearing upon the 
question. It is plain, then, that when a man says that other 
minds may exist, he falls back for the significance of his statement 
upon the evidence which he discredits. If he absolutely repudi- 
ates this evidence, his words mean nothing at all. And if he gives 
it sufficient recognition to be able to use a may^ there is no reason 
at all why he should not go further and say that other minds do 
exist. 

1 I assume here and elsewhere in this chapter that consciousnesses must 
always remain " ejective " to each other. It is the commonly accepted position. 
I maintain that even on this basis we are justified in maintaining that tlie existence 
of other minds can be proved. In the next chapter, however, the reader will find 
some reflections which seem to have a good deal of significance for the doctrine of 
ejects. 



The Existence of Other Minds 453 

To deny that such evidence may be called proof, is to limit the 
meaning of the word " proof " in an arbitrary way, and one not 
justified by common usage. The world of the plain man is a 
world of bodies and minds ; he thinks that he has abundant proof 
of the existence of these minds, and even proof that their contents 
differ in certain rather definite ways. A science has been built up 
which endeavors to give him an accurate account of the minds in 
which he believes. Shall we tell him that he has really no proof 
of their existence, and that the whole thing may be a mistake? 
What sort of a mistake is a mistake that can never by any possi- 
bility, under any conceivable circumstances, be shown to be one ? 
As well speak of an error that it is even theoretically impossible 
ever to distinguish from a truth. 

But there are persons who are quite willing to admit the exist- 
ence of other minds, who are, nevertheless, impelled by the fact 
that minds cannot directly inspect one another to conclude that 
we can never be sure "how things look to other people." I speak 
of the color red ; something is called up by the word to my neigh- 
bor's mind. Suppose that he has always had the sensation of gray 
color when he has looked at an object which has given me the 
sensation of red color. When I speak of red color will he not 
think of gray, and must it not remain concealed from me that our 
experiences differ ? 

I answer : if the inference which results in the assumption of 
other minds is good for anything, it is good for a great deal. We 
do not merely assume that other minds exist. We find ourselves 
able to say a good deal about them. No man attributes to a horse 
the mind of a human being ; and if it is possible to go as far as 
this without error, it is theoretically possible to travel to the end 
of the road. 

That men may differ in their perceptions of color has already 
been discovered, and much has been written touching the phenom- 
ena of color-blindness. It is quite true that our knowledge of 
other minds is as yet highly incomplete. It is also true that in 
attempting to describe them we may fall into error. But if we 
declare such error to be beyond the possibility of correction, we 
lay the axe to the root of the whole argument for other minds. 
Our ignorance of the contents of other minds must not vaguely be 
attributed to the fact that they are other minds. It can be ac- 
counted for in detail. It has its foundation in our ignorance of 



454 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

our own minds and bodies. Were my knowledge of my own mind 
and body ideally complete, were the point-for-point correspondence 
between mind and brain fully made out in a single instance, there 
could be no possible doubt as to the precise contents of the mind 
revealed by another brain. But I cannot attain to such a knowl- 
edge of other minds unless I know a vast deal about my own mind, 
my own brain, and the brain of the man in whose mind I am inter- 
ested. To claim that we actually enjoy such a knowledge at pres- 
ent would be to betray either an unpardonable ignorance of the 
facts or a boundless conceit. 

Our inferences as to the contents of other minds must, hence, 
be somewhat vague and loose. We must admit that a man may 
look sad and yet not feel sad, may suffer and yet not show it. 
But we may admit this frankly, and yet maintain that it is absurd 
to say that another man may be suffering, and while he is suffer- 
ing there may be no trace of his feelings in any part of his body. 
The droop at the corners of a mouth may be all that we have to go 
upon, the sole outward and visible sign within our field of view. 
If we have no more, we speak with hesitation, for facial expression 
is somewhat remotely connected with mental phenomena, and ex- 
perience has taught us that this sign may be contradicted by others. 
It is always problematic whether the widow's veil does or does not 
cover a broken heart. But to assume that the particular cerebral 
disturbance which is the concomitant of a pain in the one instance 
may really be the concomitant of a pleasure in another is to deny 
altogether the argument from analogy which leads us to infer the 
existence of other minds. If the voice can be the voice of Jacob, 
while the hands are in this fashion the hands of Esau, why not 
assume these unperceived hands to be something quite other than 
hands, or, perhaps, to be nothing at all? 

It appears, thus, that the plain man and the psychologist are 
justified in accepting the scheme of things which seems to be 
revealed to them — an external world and a realm of minds which 
are related to each other through bodies which form a part of the 
external world. What is meant by the external world, what is 
implied by the words " my mind," how we are to conceive of minds 
as related to bodies, what we mean by " another mind," and how 
we come to assume that other minds exist — all this I have tried 
to make plain in this and in the preceding chapters. To the plain 
man it is not particularly plain ; and the psychologist, whatever 



The Existence of Other Minds 455 

else he may do, usually gives us little assistance in the analysis of 
those conceptions with which the metaphysician must occupy him- 
self. But I am inclined to maintain that in what I have said I 
have not wandered far from what really is implicit in common 
thought. In analyzing, I have not denied the justice of the dis- 
tinctions which men have drawn ; the results are the less startling, 
and, I believe, the more worthy of confidence. 

There is one more matter upon which I should touch before 
bringing this chapter to an end. It is generally believed that we 
all gaze upon the same external world. Each man possesses his 
own mental life as no one else possesses it, but the external world 
is a common possession. This was inconsistently recognized by 
Mill when he said : " the Possibilities of Sensation which are called 
outward objects, are possibilities of it to other beings as well as to 
me." But what can it mean to speak of the external world as a 
common possession? Can it mean that something in one conscious- 
ness is identical with something in another ? 

Another man and I are at the same time looking at a tree. He 
is near the tree, and I am far from it. He is conscious of the tree 
as large and green ; I am conscious of it as small and blue. Is 
anything more of the tree actually " given " to him than is given 
in the expanse of green ? and is anything more actually " given " 
to me than this speck of blue color? The percept is, to be sure, 
always more than what is given in the sense ; and to identify the 
thing as a tree, both he and I must supplement what is given 
in the sense by materials drawn from the storehouse of memory 
and imagination. I cannot, however, draw upon his stores, nor 
can he upon mine. His sensations are his sensations, and they 
appear to differ in important particulars from those of which I am 
conscious. His percept as a whole — and is this not the only tree 
within his reach? — must be declared a distinct thing from my 
percept. What, then, have we in common? Not the sensation, 
for his sensations and mine may be very different ; not the repre- 
sentative elements in the percept, for what exists in his imagination 
cannot be identical with what exists in mine. And nothing 
appears to be "present" to either of us, that does not fall under 
the one or the other of these two heads. How, then, can we both 
perceive the same tree ? 

The fallacy which lurks in such reasonings as these ought not 
to be difficult of detection to those who have read with compre- 



456 Other Minds , and the Realm of Mmds 

hension what has been said in the preceding pages. It consists in 
basing the statement of a problem upon the recognition of certain 
distinctions, and then, by the obliteration of these same distinc- 
tions, rendering the solution of the problem impossible. If I 
begin by saying that another man and I are at the same time look- 
ing at a tree, I have no right to deny the distinctions that make 
this statement a significant one. Either one has a right to make 
it, or one has not. If one has not, there is no problem. If gne 
has, one must not lose sight of the fact that one mind has been 
distinguished from another, and both minds from an external world. 
Such being the case, it is manifestly inconsistent to put the exter- 
nal world into either mind, and it is a palpable absurdity to put 
the same external world into both. If the two minds are really 
two, — are mutually exclusive, — what is a part of one cannot be 
identical with what is a part of the other. To say that it is in 
some sense the same, although in two minds, is to take refuge in an 
ambiguous word, and to rest content with that. 

We have seen that reflective thought recognizes the justice of 
distinguishing between the mind and the world, and between one 
mind and another. My mind is to be distinguished from the 
external world. No one of my percepts is to be confounded with 
any object in the external world. As my percept it has its place 
in the subjective order, not in the objective. To symbolize this, I 
grant my body a " halo," after the fashion of the parallelist, and I 
call this my consciousness. I must never forget that my conscious- 
ness, as my consciousness, simply disappears, if the objective order 
be wholly abstracted from. 

Following the golden rule, I treat my neighbor to a halo, i.e. I 
treat him as I treat myself. But to what is the halo affixed? to a 
body in the objective order; in the same objective order which 
contains my body. No one of my neighbor's percepts is to be 
identified with any one of my percepts. Such an identification 
means an obliteration of the whole construction ; my neighbor's 
percept would not be his percept, my percept would not be my 
percept, the external object would not be the external object. 

It should be borne in mind that it is not one and the same thing 
to say " the external world," and to say " the external world as re- 
vealed to me." The words to me indicate clearly that, in making 
use of the latter expression, one is referring a given experience to 
the subjective order, not to the objective. It is easy to forget this, 



The Existence of Other Minds 457 

to say, all I can know of the world is the world as it is revealed in 
my consciousness — and having said this, to conclude that the 
world can only be known as percept. The error has, as I have 
pointed out, a relative justification in the fact that an experience 
that can take its place in the objective order can also, under ap- 
propriate circumstances, be relegated to the subjective order, 
though not, of course, without losing its character as objective. 
But when it is clearly seen that, if no world can be known as not- 
percept, no world can be known as percept^ the pitfall should be 
avoided. 

But the world that is known as not-percept is neither my world, 
nor the world of my neighbor. It cannot be put into my halo ; the 
halos are many, it is one. It is not the world as it exists in my 
consciousness, nor is it the world as it exists in the consciousness 
of any one else. But how, then, can we even speak of it? Can a 
man talk about a world which is not the world revealed to him, 
the world in his consciousness ? 

He who raises this question has taken the parallelistic figure 
too literally. I have pointed out in the chapter on "The Dis- 
tinction between the Mind and the World " that an objective order 
is revealed as well as a subjective. By the words " my conscious- 
ness " I sum up the phenomena of the subjective order. But it is 
absurd to allow the use of this name to mislead me into ignoring 
the objective order. 

Am I, then, to say : I can be conscious of what is not in my con- 
sciousness ? The expression is undoubtedly an unhappy one. Per- 
haps I can best answer the question by saying : If, by the expression 
"my consciousness" I mean no more than my halo, and if for me to be 
conscious of this and that means no more than to have this and that 
in my halo, then I can certainly never be conscious of anything that 
is not in my consciousness. But if I thus limit the meaning of the 
verb " to be conscious," what word shall I employ to indicate the 
recognition of the external world, of the objective order ? It has 
quite as good a right to recognition as the subjective, and recognize 
it I must, if I will retain possession even of the subjective. Is it 
not better to recognize that the word " consciousness " may be used 
in a broader and in a narrower sense ? May I not say that, in one 
sense, I am conscious of nothing that is not a part of my conscious- 
ness, but that, in another, I am conscious of external things as well, 
and, indeed, as i^mmediately ? 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE DISTRIBUTION OF MINDS 

In many instances it seems so natural to assume the existence 
of other minds, and the general nature of such minds seems so 
clearly indicated, that reflection makes no pause to consider the 
process of inference, and no doubts or questionings are brought to 
the birth. Between my neighbor's body and my own, and between 
his actions and my own, there is a close analogy. As I converse 
with him the thoughts in his mind rise up before me through no 
conscious effort of my own. I am filled with admiration of his 
eloquence, impressed with the lucidity and systematic arrange- 
ment of his ideas, inspired by the loftiness of his sentiments. 
That he has a mind, and that it is a mind of a high order, it does 
not occur to me to doubt. 

But when I am led by the psychologist to reflect upon the 
subject of minds and their contents, and upon the difficulties 
which attend the determination of the exact contents of minds, 
I am brought to admit that some questions may reasonably be 
asked even in such a case. May I assume from the warmth of 
my neighbor's expressions that he is really conscious of such 
a suffusion of feeling as I would be conscious of were I speaking 
thus ? Do his words always mean to him just what they mean to 
me ? I must know my neighbor rather intimately before I can 
be even moderately sure that I am not assuming in him a likeness 
to myself that is not justified by fact. That, in general, men 
may mean one thing and be understood to mean another, no man 
can deny — least of all the student of philosophy who has watched 
the sympathetic commentator inflating his chosen author with a 
wind of doctrine not his own. If my neighbor and I are closely 
alike, and if I know my neighbor intimately, it seems easy for me 
to understand him. But no two men are exactly alike, and there 
is always room for some misconception. 

And the greater the difference, the greater the danger of mis- 

458 



The. Distribution of Minds 459 

conception. It is rather difficult for a man to comprehend the 
workings of the mind of a woman ; it is not easy for an adult to 
realize how bare of content may be the mind of a child ; try as he 
will, the finished product of an elaborate civilization must enter 
very imperfectly into the pains and pleasures, the interests and 
ideals, the hopes and fears, of the Australian savage. He who 
would distribute " halos " to all sorts and conditions of men 
should often, in justice to himself, stand prepared to discard the 
uncompromising and clearly outlined gold plate of a Fra Angelico, 
and content himself with the modest and faintly indicated touches 
of light that adorn the canvases of a Titian. 

If there is this uncertainty in the inference to other minds, 
when we are dealing with our fellows, what are we to expect 
when we come to give an account of minds of a lower order ? No 
one doubts that there are such minds. The philosophic theory 
that darkened the eyes of the Cartesian, leading him to deny the 
existence of consciousness in any creature below man, no longer 
obscures for us the significance of an analogy too striking to 
escape the notice of any man not under the influence of strong 
prepossession. A creaking door and a yelping dog are evidently 
not to be brought under the same category. Some sort of a mind 
we must allow the dog, but what sort? The animal psychology 
at present growing up occupies a legitimate field of human inquiry, 
but those most familiar with its results are more conscious than 
other men of the pitfalls which cover the ground, and are much 
more distrustful of the anecdotes illustrative of the intelligence of 
the brute creation which pass current among the unscientific. 

Yet, although we are upon uncertain ground when we attempt 
to describe the psychic life of such animals as the ape, the dog, 
the cat, or the horse, it does not seem absurd for us to try, at 
least, to give some indication of its nature. These creatures do 
not resemble man closely, but they do resemble him unmistakably 
in some particulars. With each remove, however, our difficulties 
thicken. The horrified tourist who wanders into a Cuban market 
and sees a businesslike Chinaman unpack a row of live turtles as 
though they were so many valises, and poke about among their 
entrails to exhibit the fat there embedded, cannot help asking 
himself whether the turtles object seriously to martyrdom. To 
all outward appearance, they are less discomposed than the on- 
looker. It is a brave man who will undertake to paint the 



460 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

emotions of such a being, or to tell us what the world means 
to an ant, a fly, a cuttlefish, or an earthworm. Yet, that all these 
enjoy a psychic life of some sort, we feel impelled to admit. We 
grant them minds by the same analogy, although in a weakened 
form, by which we grant minds to other men. And if we may 
grant minds to these, can we deny something of the kind to the 
amoeba, that little jellylike speck which stands, it is true, very 
far removed from the brutes with which we began our descent, 
and yet is to be found in the same series with them ? 

Nor is it by any means self-evident that we may not go farther 
than this. The analogy between plant life and animal life has so 
impressed many thoughtful men that they have felt impelled to 
conclude that the distribution of minds or of something like minds 
cannot be limited to the animal kingdom. The poetic fancy of a 
Fechner ^ can scarcely be regarded as a sober guide to truth ; but 
the analogies which impressed Fechner have given rise to ques- 
tionings in minds much less impressionable. Who can draw a 
definite line through nature, and say, on the one side of this we 
have unmistakable evidence of the revelation of minds, and on 
the other such evidence is wholly absent? Shall we draw the line 
below the plant? There is the crystal, which inhabits a debatable 
land, as it were, between the living and the dead. And who can 
prove a total absence of consciousness even in the realm of 
amorphous matter? 

It will be observed that, when we begin with man and descend 
gradually along the scale of beings, we seem, in the upper part of 
the series, to be in doubt, not whether or not there are minds, but 
rather what sort of minds are revealed. Toward the bottom of 
the series we ask ourselves in much perplexity whether anything 
like mind is revealed at all. 

It is natural that this should be so. There is but one argu- 
ment for other minds, and that is the argument from analogy dis- 
cussed in the preceding chapter. Where the analogy is a close 
one, our conclusion is unhesitating ; as it grows more remote, 
we waver, and dwell in uncertainty. As we have seen, even in 
the case of man our knowledge of the relation of mind and body 
is far from satisfactory, and yet this knowledge is to serve as a 
basis for all our inferences. 

It is said that drowning men will clutch at straws, and it is 
1 "Nanna, oder iiber das Seelenlebeu der Pflanzeu." 



The Distribution of Minds 461 

certainly true that men who feel their ignorance to be galling will 
fill the gaps in their knowledge with the most unsubstantial of 
speculative fabrics. Upon the ambiguous adage that nature makes 
no leap is built the fanciful doctrine that every material atom is 
accompanied by an atom of mind-stuff, and thus it is proved that 
every part of nature is animated. I shall have occasion to dis- 
cuss this doctrine later, and need not dwell upon it here. Suffice 
it to say that it is one of those short cuts to knowledge that 
should be plainly marked with the sign — Danger ! We have no 
whit of evidence to prove that there is any such concomitance of 
mental phenomena and material phenomena as is here postulated. 
For all we know to the contrary, the simplest manifestation of 
mind may demand as its concomitant a highly complex material 
fact, and such complex material facts may not be found so very 
widely distributed in the realm of nature.^ Pleasing as may be 
such bold speculations as the one referred to, there is one thing 
that ought to be even more pleasing to the serious mind, and that 
is sober truth. Here the sober truth is, that within a limited 
sphere we have rather definite and reasonably assured knowledge ; 
beyond that sphere our knowledge grows gradually more uncer- 
tain and more indefinite, until it fades out into complete ignorance. 
We may, if we choose, hazard a guess at what lies in the darkness 
about us, but it is not wise to assume that our guesses are some- 
thing more than they really are. 

But to return to man. We have, in previous chapters, referred 
his mind to his brain, and not to his body as a whole. The brain 
of man is, however, enormously complex, and is almost unexplored 
territory. It is quite possible that a relatively small part of it is 
to be made concomitant with his " halo " — with the consciousness 
to which we commonly refer when we speak of the mind of this 
man or of that. Are we to deny halos to all other parts ? Are 
we to assume that there is no consciousness at all connected 
with the functioning of such parts ? Are we to overlook the 
lower nervous centres in man, and to grant the whole man but 
the one halo ? This could easily be done by a Cartesian. To 
him, between the soul, the full-fledged responsible soul seated in 
the pineal gland, and bare mechanism without any consciousness 
whatever there is no halfway house. Either a creature has 

1 1 shall ask the reader, in judging this statement, to take into consideration 
what is said in Chapters XXXII to XXXV. 



462 Other Minds, and the Recdm of Minds 

a soul, a thinking, feeling, willing soul, the traditional soul with 
all its traditional properties, or it has nothing ; if it is not as good 
as human, it is a creaking door, a beaten drum, a responsive mech- 
anism that has no *' inside " to which we need pay attention. 

There is no danger at the present day of our denying to the 
lower animals minds of some sort. A frog acts as if it had intel- 
ligence, and we ascribe to it intelligence. There are, however, 
persons to whom the problem seems to take on a new aspect when 
it is a question, not of a whole animal, but of a part of such. A 
frog is a creature that may be decapitated without ceasing to live, 
and a decapitated frog furnishes the physiologist and the psychol- 
ogist with much food for reflection. 

The physiologist cuts off a frog's cerebral hemispheres by a 
section between them and the optic thalami, and at first sight the 
animal appears to be in a state but little different from that in 
which he was before. He can breathe, swallow, crawl, jump, 
swim, and guide himself by the sense of sight in avoiding obsta- 
cles placed between him and the light. More careful observation 
shows that he has lost some of his spontaneity ; he seems to be a 
simpler and a more calculable thing than he was. He does not 
show fear, and he is not stimulated by hunger to feed himself. 
Nevertheless, it would not occur to any one not prepossessed in 
favor of some theory touching mind and brain, to deny him a 
mind of some sort. His intellectual horizon seems to be limited ; 
remote considerations of all sorts are beyond him ; but he acts as 
though he had purposes and adapted his movements to the attain- 
ment of, at least, immediate ends. 

If the cut be between the thalami and the optic lobes, the 
activities of the animal are further restricted, but such activities 
as jumping and swimming appear to be quite normal, and the 
creature croaks regularly when pinched in certain ways. If the 
cut be made in such a way as to leave only the cerebellum and 
the medulla oblongata attached to the spinal cord, locomotion l)y 
land and by water becomes somewhat imperfect, but the frog still 
appears to prefer having his body in one position to having it in 
another, and turns over when placed upon his back. 

Now, if we go one step farther, and rid a frog of his whole 
brain, including the medulla, we have left on our hands a very 
poor sort of a frog indeed. Tlie creature is not dead, but he does 
not breathe, swallow, or sit erect. If placed on his back, he stays 



The Distribution of Minds 463 

there. He cannot jump or swim or croak. Can we still say that 
he has preferences f Shall we attribute to this remnant of a frog 
anything of the nature of mind ? Let us try the classical experi- 
ment of hanging him up by the nose and laying a bit of paper 
wet with acid upon his skin. He makes what seem to be pur- 
posive efforts to reach the spot irritated, and to wipe away the 
irritant. Failing to do it with one foot, he may try to do it with 
another, thus apparently recognizing the inadequacy of one 
method of dealing with this situation and abandoning it for a new 
method. Are we to deny that there is any analogy between the 
actions of such a frog and the actions of a normal frog or those of 
a man ? The mutilated frog certainly acts as though he meant to 
do something. A disinterested spectator not prepossessed in 
favor of some theory as to the soul's seat naturally concludes that 
he does mean to do something. 

To be sure, the less of a nervous system we leave a frog, the 
less do we recognize in its actions what we are accustomed to call 
spontaneity, and the more are we struck by their regularity and 
precision. We feel inclined to compare them with the function- 
ing of the mechanisms constructed by man. One may even 
elevate this difference to the rank of an absolute difference of 
Mnd^ and maintain that the mutilated frog is a machine merely, 
and is, hence, unconscious ; while the normal frog is not a pure 
machine at all, but is a machine ruled by a consciousness. 

But if the reasonings contained in a previous chapter ^ have 
any weight, there is no good reason to believe that the most 
active and spontaneous of frogs is to be regarded as other than a 
mechanism, nor are we justified in assuming that the recognition 
of this creature or that as a mechanism is any reason for believing 
that the creature in question has not a mind. Moreover, one 
must remember that the normal frog and the frog with but a 
spinal cord are not separated by an unfilled interval. We may 
descend along our series of sections somewhat as we descend 
along the animal scale from higher to lower. We find less and 
less evidence of intelligence, less spontaneity and variety of action, 
less extended a horizon. But our differences seem to be through- 
out differences in degree rather than in kind. 

It does not, then, appear to be absurd to speak of the con- 
sciousness connected with this or that lower nervous centre in the 

1 Chapter XV. 



464 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

frog. The possible number of such consciousnesses, the question 
whether they may exist simultaneously, and other matters of the 
sort, are legitimate subjects for investigation. It can readily be 
seen that a new complication has entered into the question of the 
distribution of halos. One feels strongly inclined to envy the 
Cartesian the simplicity of his solution. 

Now, a man may not be treated like a frog. If we decapitate 
him, he will die, and all evidence of mind will disappear. Never- 
theless, the inadequacy of the Cartesian psychology has been made 
apparent even in the case of human beings. This is not the place 
to enter at length into a description of phenomena the details of 
which concern rather the physiologist and the psychologist than 
the metaphysician, but it is plain that the metaphysician has no 
right to discuss the distribution of minds without taking into 
consideration the conclusions at which the physiologist and the 
psychologist seem forced to arrive. 

The physiologist sometimes speaks of a rudimentary conscious- 
ness connected with various lower centres in man — with the 
spinal cord, or with the medulla, or with the basal ganglia in the 
brain. The facts which he can marshal are not so abundant or 
so unambiguous as those which he finds at hand when he is ex- 
perimenting upon the frog, and in the assumption of the existence 
of such rudimentary consciousnesses we may or may not feel 
willing to follow him. But even if we refuse to follow him in 
this, we are not on that account justified in concluding that, under 
all circumstances, but one consciousness may be granted to one 
man. 

The cortex of the brain, to which in the present state of our 
knowledge we seem justified in referring the consciousness of a 
man, — the consciousness which we habitually regard as the mind 
of the man, and of which we are thinking when we describe his 
character, — may, as we have abundant evidence to prove, be the 
seat of other consciousnesses as well. Volumes have been written 
upon the phenomena of dual or even multiplex consciousness, 
and the facts are too numerous and too well established to be met 
by a general scepticism. Of the truth of some of them, at least, 
any one may convince himself by a few experiments upon a good 
hypnotic subject. It may be experimentally demonstrated that 
a consciousness may be divided, and that its parts may become 
foreign to each other, as the normal consciousness of one person 



The Distribution of Minds 465 

is foreign to that of another person. Says Professor James, after 
an excellent summary of such facts : " It must be admitted, there- 
fore, that, in certain persons^ at least, the total possible consciousness 
may he split into parts which coexist hut mutually ignore each other, 
and share the objects of knowledge between them."^ Which 
means that there may be two consciousnesses connected with one 
brain. 

It appears, then, that we cannot feel that we have done justice 
to the subject when we have diagram matically represented to 
ourselves one halo as related to one organism. Sometimes we have 
palpable evidence of the existence of more than one halo at the one 
time; sometimes there seems to be an alternation of halos ; some- 
times two halos appear to join and form hut one. The old Carte- 
sian notion of the mind and its relation to the body will no longer 
serve. " The absolute unity of the ego," writes Janet, " is a 
metaphysical conclusion, which is true, perhaps, but which ought 
to be arrived at as an inference from the facts, and ought not to 
impose itself upon the facts. There is no proof of the conscious- 
ness of an animal save the intelligent adaptation of its movements. 
We must discover whether this intelligent adaptation reveals to 
us in the animal one or two or three Consciousnesses, and only 
then must we draw our conclusion as to the unity or the division 
of the ego." 2 These words Professor Janet has written out of a 
very full knowledge at first hand of the class of facts upon which 
I have commented above. Certainly no one unacquainted with 
these facts is in a position to give an intelligent opinion upon the 
subject of consciousness and its unity. 

Here the question naturally arises : Does all this mean that 
we are to repudiate the sort of reasoning that led Descartes to 
refer the mind to the brain, and thus to lay the foundations of 
the science of cerebral psychology ? I answer : Not at all. It 
means simply that reasonings of much the same sort are to be 
carried out more carefully, that facts to which scant justice was 
done before are to be brought into more careful consideration, 
that metaphysical hypotheses inherited from the past are to be 
prevented from having an undue influence upon our conclusions. 
If we are led by certain phenomena which present themselves to 
infer that two consciousnesses are to be referred to one brain, we 

1 "Psychology," Vol. I, p. 206. 

2 " L'Automatisme Psychologlque," Paris, 1889, p. 26. 
2h 



40 G Other Minds , and the Realm of Minds 

are following much the same chain of argument as when we infer 
that one consciousness is to be referred to one brain. In each 
case we know, at least vaguely, what we mean by a conscious- 
ness, and the problem of localization is the same problem in every 
case. 

It should be remarked that the fact that more than one con- 
sciousness, or perhaps I should say here more than one personality, 
may under some circumstances be revealed by one organism, is 
not a discovery of modern science. From the earliest times it 
had been recognized with superstitious awe that the normal per- 
sonality of a man may be dethroned, and its place usurped by 
another. The Pythia was not supposed to speak of her own 
motion and to utter her own thoughts. The phenomena inter- 
preted as indicating demoniac possession had frozen the blood of 
many generations of men and had given rise to cruel exorcisms. 
The Protean forms of the trance state, loss of memory due to 
disease, — in short, many things that are to the modern psycholo- 
gist of the highest significance, — were generally recognized long 
before modern psychology had its birth. ^ It is impossible to 
suppose that Descartes had not within his reach sufficient mate- 
rial to give him good cause to modify his psychological doctrine, 
had he been capable of seeing the significance of the material. 
But the time was not ripe for a complete recasting of old concep- 
tions, and the meaning of the facts was not grasped. 

The possibility of a coalescence of the consciousnesses referred 
to one brain suggests a further possibility which many will con- 
template as startling. " When I come to the conclusion that you 
are conscious," says Clifford, " and that there are objects in your 
consciousness similar to those in mine, I am not inferring any 
actual or possible feelings of my own, but your feelings, which 
are not, and cannot by any possibility become, objects in my 
consciousness." Upon this passage Professor Pearson comments 
as follows : — 

" To this it may be replied, that, were our physiological knowl- 
edge and surgical manipulation sufficiently complete, it is con- 
ceivable that it would be possible for me to be conscious of your 

1 See Spinoza's reflections upon a case of loss of memory. He refuses to re,c:ard 
the subject as the same man after his misfortune. The discussion is of especial 
interest a8 coming from the pen of one who so early saw the inadequacy of the Car- 
tesian doctrine. — "Ethics," iv, 30, scholium. 



The Distribution of Minds 467 

feelings, to recognize your consciousness as a direct sense-impres- 
sion ; let us say, for example, by connecting the cortex of your 
brain with that of mine through a suitable commissure of nerve- 
substance. The possibility of this physical verification of other- 
consciousness does not seem more remote than that of a journey 
to a fixed star. . . . Clifford has given the name eject to exist- 
ences which, like other-consciousness, are only inferred, and the 
name is a convenient one. At the same time it seems to me 
doubtful whether the distinction between object (what might pos- 
sibly come to my consciousness as a direct sense-impression) and 
eject is so marked as he would have us to believe. The compli- 
cated physical motions of another person's brain, it is admitted, 
might possibly be objective realities to me ; but, on the other 
hand, might not the hypothetical brain commissure render me 
just as certain of the workings of another person's consciousness 
as I am of my own ? " ^ 

It must be admitted that this question is at present one of 
theoretic interest only, for we have as yet no single fact to 
indicate that two brains may be made such a physiological unit 
as to become the seat of a single consciousness. Nevertheless, 
the fact that a consciousness " may be split into parts which 
coexist, but mutually ignore each other," and the further fact that 
these parts may reunite to form one consciousness, makes the above 
suggestion one that we cannot dismiss as absurd. In making it. 
Professor Pearson does not appear to have had in mind the 
phenomenon above alluded to as furnishing its plausibility to 
the speculation. He refers only to the disputed phenomena of 
" thought-transference," which, even if we accept them as 
genuine, are susceptible of more than one interpretation. But 
well-attested facts with a significance less dubious do exist, and 
it is worth our while to pause for reflection upon them. 

I must recognize the fact that my consciousness is both extensive 
and protensive. I am conscious of an indefinite number of mental 
phenomena simultaneously. It would scarcely seem worth while 
to insist upon what appears so self-evident, were it not that the 
fact has been denied by psychologists of standing. The doctrine 
that the total consciousness of any moment is an unanalyzable 
unit, without parts or constitutive elements, is, however, so 
repugnant to our actual experience, so incompatible with the 
1 "The Grammar of Science," 2d edition, London, 1900, pp. 49-50. 



468 Other Minds , and the Recdm of Minds 

possibility of psychological analysis of any sort, and so evidently 
a misconception arising from a prepossession in favor of a certain 
metaphysical theory of the unity of the ego, that it may be set 
aside without entering into a prolonged discussion. If I confine 
myself to the data furnished by one sense, and pay attention only 
to what seems presented when I fix my eyes upon this desk 
littered with papers, I cannot believe that what is in consciousness 
even at the moment is an absolute and undistinguishable unit. My 
consciousness is, thus, complex, and possesses a varied simultaneous 
content ; this I may call its extensive aspect. 

Again. In an earlier chapter I have argued that what is given 
in consciousness intuitively must be allowed some duration, if the 
symbolic representation of periods of time is to be truly symbolic, 
i.e. if the symbols by means of which we represent to ourselves 
extended periods of time are to have a true significance.^ But 
when I speak of my consciousness as protensive^ 1 do not mean to 
allow it a duration limited to the span intuitively given in con- 
sciousness. The consciousness which I recognize as my own, and 
the consciousness which I attribute to this man or that, I conceive 
to extend over a series of years, and to include an indefinite 
number of successive states, no one of which is to be confounded 
with another. This is entirely in accordance with common usage, 
which regards the mind of a man as something which is revealed 
by his body as long as the body lasts ; or, in any case, as long as 
it is not smothered in its tenement by the slow paralysis of age or 
driven from it by the onslaughts of disease. By the mind of a 
man no one means a mere pulse of experience, and it does not 
occur to us to attribute to man a succession of minds which are 
born and die as the shadow moves upon the dial. Whatever we 
may mean by the unity of consciousness, we recognize it as 
embracing a series of successive states, as well as a more or less 
complex group of coexistent elements. Consciousness may be 
protensive as well as extensive. 

Now, it will be generally admitted that I am immediately con- 
scious of the sensations which present themselves to me at tlie 
present moment. It will also be admitted that I am immediately 
conscious of various representative elements as representative ele- 
ments. It may be maintained, however, that I can be conscious of 
these latter immediately only because they have a present exist- 

1 See Chapter XIII. 



The Distribution of Minds 469 

ence, and that I cannot be immediately conscious of mental expe- 
riences which I had ten years ago, or even ten minutes ago. 
Are not these gone, never to return ? Can one experience a 
non-existent experience ? How, then, can past experiences be 
said to belong to consciousness ? How can they form a part of 
the one whole with experiences which now exist ? 

In answer to this I will say that it is aside from our purpose 
just here to enter into an exhaustive examination of the meaning 
of the phrase "immediate knowledge." I have no desire to 
obliterate any distinctions which may be of use to the psycholo- 
gist, or, for other purposes, to the metaphysician ; but we are 
concerned with the distinction of object and eject, and it appears 
sufficient to remark that my mental experiences of ten years ago, 
which I recall in an act of memory, are not related to any sensa- 
tions which I may be experiencing at the present moment in a 
way at all analogous to that in which another man's experiences 
are related to mine. My own past forms one whole with my 
present, at least in a sense in which another man's past does not. 
I do not infer that I experienced such and such sensations ; I 
remember it. My past is presented to me as immediately as it is 
possible for a past to be presented. That another man has had a 
given experience at a given time I cannot know in this way, but 
I must discover the fact as result of an argument of the sort to 
which we always have recourse when we concern ourselves with 
the contents of other minds. This has been recognized by those 
who have dwelt upon the distinction between object and eject. 
Clifford, for example, classes as objects for me, not merely the 
feelings which go to make up my consciousness of the moment, but 
also all past and all future feelings which belong to the one series 
in the sense upon which I have dwelt above, and he contrasts this 
series as a whole with those other series which he recognizes as 
other minds. 

The whole series of phenomena thus recognized as objective, 
as known, not by inference, but directly, I refer to my body in 
the way indicated in Chapters XXIII and XXIV, and I diagram- 
matically represent them as the one " halo." It is important to 
realize that this means and must mean that I know these phe- 
nomena, not merely objectively, but also in another way. I know 
them in their relation to an external world ; I know their physical 
signs. It may be said, thus, that, for the phenomena of my own 



470 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

mind, I have both objective and ejective evidence. Did I not 
have such evidence, w^ere I not conscious of my own mental 
experiences, so to speak, from both sides, the argument for other 
minds would utterly lapse. I should have no ground whatever 
upon which to take my stand while drawing my inference. 
Yesterday I suffered from the toothache. I can remember it 
directly. I can also remember my bodily reaction, my complaints 
and wry faces, the advice of solicitous friends, my visit to the 
dentist. These last constitute what I may call my toothache as 
grasped "from the physical side." They are ejective evidence of 
its existence. For the consciousness of another man I have no 
other evidence than this ; I perceive physical signs, and I infer 
the existence of psychic phenomena. 

And if any part of the consciousness that I call mine has be- 
come detached from the rest, it is for the time being in the same 
case — my evidence for its existence is purely ejective. I take up 
a paper which I wrote many years since, and I follow with curi- 
osity the course of what was once my thought. It may be that I 
have forgotten ever having written the paper, and have so com- 
pletely forgotten the train of thought indicated in it that even a 
perusal fails to awaken my dormant memories. In such a case it 
is clear that I have but one sort of evidence to prove that the 
thoughts in question really existed at the time indicated — the 
sort of evidence that persuades me to believe that other men are 
conscious or have been conscious. Much that we have thought 
and felt during the first years of our lives can be known to us 
only on such evidence. The tale told by the nurse or by the 
mother is accepted, though it awakens no memory. On the other 
hand, a tale that is heard may after a time drag back to life 
memories which seemed hopelessly lost. The man who has quite 
forgotten his heedless promise may, as a result of pondering upon 
the matter, come to remember what he has forgotten. That is 
to say, objective evidence may appear and corroborate evidence 
merely ejective. What was cut off from a consciousness may 
come to be joined to it again. 

Now, we are not in the habit of making a separate halo of 
every bit of consciousness which we have lost. In other words, 
we do not think of it as being a different mind, or even anything 
like a different mind. It seems clear, however, that if we fail to 
see here a significant analogy, it is because we have not sufficiently 



The Distribution of Minds 471 

reflected. But even the unreflective must be impressed by the 
more striking phenomena which may be produced experimentally 
in hypnotic subjects, or which present themselves spontaneously, 
to the consternation of the family and friends of the unhappy 
victims of certain nervous diseases. A consciousness may be 
divided in time in such a way that whole sections of a life may be 
cut off and become purely ejective to the rest ; a consciousness 
may also be divided in such a way that we are bound to refer to 
the one organism coexistent personalities, each of which is ejective 
to the other. The division may be, so to speak, either transverse 
or longitudinal. And we may have indubitable evidence of the 
subsequent coalescence of these separate consciousnesses to form 
one mind again. 

I have said above that we have no single fact to prove that two 
different brains may become such a functional unit that the minds 
referred to them may coalesce to form a single consciousness. The 
question has but a speculative interest. Nevertheless, the fact 
remains that what was purely ejective to a given consciousness 
may, under certain conditions, become objectively known, may 
become a part of it ; and in the present state of our knowledge 
(or of our ignorance) we should admit that it does not seem 
absurd to speak of the theoretic possibility of the coalescence of 
the consciousnesses of two different men. 

Our consciousness consists of a very large number of successive 
states, and its content at any moment is highly complex. It is 
the mark of this great collection of psychic elements that each 
part of it is known both objectively and ejectively ; that is, that 
it is known directly, and known in relation to its physical signs. 
How extended may be the consciousness known in this twofold 
way it is impossible to determine a priori^ and it is equally impos- 
sible to say to how large a portion of the physical world such a 
consciousness may be related as we relate mind and brain. The 
question is simply a question of fact. 

As things stand, we have no reason to relate in this way one 
consciousness to more than one organism, and we must accept the 
fact that the innumerable consciousnesses which we believe to exist 
in connection with the bodies of other men and of the brutes are 
certified to us only on ejective evidence. So far as we know, we 
shall never attain to any proof of their existence different in kind 
from that which we possess now. Yet the mere fact that, even in 



472 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

a single instance, what has been pure eject may come to be known 
also as object, is not without its significance for the whole doctrine 
of eject and object. It is one thing to say : we have only ejec- 
tive evidence for the existence of other men's minds ; and it is 
another thing to say that it is inconceivable that we ever should 
have any other evidence of the existence of what we now call 
other men's minds. We seem to find in the above reflections an 
added reason for repudiating the statement that our belief in the 
existence of other men's minds cannot be theoretically justified. 

Does this obliterate the distinction between object and eject ? 
Not in the least. For another mind, so long as it remains another 
mind, we can never have anything but ejective evidence — there 
is but one argument for other minds. Should any other mind or 
fragment of mind become one with ours, we should know it, as we 
now know our own mind, in a twofold way. We should know 
it directly, and not merely through its physical signs. 

It is important not to misunderstand this statement. When I 
maintain that it is not inconceivable that we may come to know 
directly what is now to us another mind, and is known only as 
eject, I do not mean that the mind in question may come to be 
perceived as an atom may, perhaps, come to be perceived. To be 
perceived thus it would have to be a material thing. I mean to 
maintain only that it may come to be known as my mind is now 
known, that it may form one consciousness with the latter. This 
explanation is not wholly unnecessary, for the words " object '* 
and " objective " may easily be misleading. In saying that I may 
conceivably come to have objective knowledge of another mind, 
or rather, of what was another mind, I can only mean that I may 
come to know the phenomena in question as I know mental expe- 
riences, once forgotten — lost, cut off from my consciousness — 
but which have been restored to me. Such experiences I do not 
perceive, and I do not expect to perceive, as I perceive another 
man's body. If I choose to say that I know them as object, I 
must bear in mind that this does not mean that I know them as 
external object. Similarly, any mind that I may come to know 
directly will not be known as external object. Could it be thus 
known, it would not be mind. When contrasted with "eject" 
and "ejective," the words "object" and "objective" are given a 
'^''fto.ial sense, as the reader has, no doubt, remarked. 



CHAPTER XXIX 
THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

Such reflections as are contained in the preceding pages give 
a peculiar insistence to the question : What, after all, do we 
mean by one consciousness f How are we to conceive the differ- 
ence between two consciousnesses, " sharing the objects of knowl- 
edge between them," and a single consciousness ? The psychologist 
unhesitatingly draws the distinction. We may diagrammatically 
symbolize the difference by representing it as the difference 
between two halos and one. But what is it that leads us to call 
a certain number of psychic phenomena a consciousness, and to 
ascribe to them a certain unity ? 

Perhaps the best way for me to approach this question is to 
show how the problem of the unity of consciousness has presented 
itself to an acute psychologist whose studies have forced it into a 
position of peculiar prominence. After a careful examination of 
the phenomena of catalepsy, where the consciousness of the indi- 
vidual appears to be reduced to a single sensation or a very 
limited group of such ; of the phenomena of the somnambulistic 
states, with which we are all familiar as illustrated in hypnotic 
subjects ; and of the curious curtailings of the normal conscious- 
ness in certain hysterical patients, who may lose out of their lives 
various groups of sensations or the memory of whole weeks, 
months, or years, — M. Janet, whose admirable work on " Psycho- 
logical Automatism " I have cited in the preceding chapter, feels 
impelled to conceive of the phenomena of consciousness and of 
their unity as is indicated in the following extract : — 

"The phenomenon produced in our consciousness when an 
impression has been made on our senses and which is betrayed by 
the phrases : ' I see a light ; I feel a prick,' is already a very 
complex phenomenon. It is not constituted by the mere brute 
sensation alone ; but it includes in addition an operation of active 
synthesis, present at every moment, which connects this sensation 

473 



474 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

^vith the group of images and of anterior judgments which con- 
stitute the ego or the personality. The apparently simple fact 
which is expressed by the words ' I see ; I hear,' is, even if we 
leave out of account the ideas of externality, distance, and locali- 
zation, already a complex perception. I have insisted upon this 
idea before, when studying automatic acts performed in the 
cataleptic state. I there adopted the opinion of Maine de Biran, 
who distinguishes in the human mind a purely affective life of 
mere sensations, phenomena conscious but not attributed to a 
personality, and a perceptive life of sensations united, systematized, 
and attached to a personality. 

"We may, while attaching to the figure only a purely sym- 
bolic value, represent to ourselves our conscious perception as a 
double process ; as including : (1) the simultaneous existence of 
a certain number of conscious sensations, tactual (^T T' T"), mus- 
cular (if M M"), visual CVV V"), and auditory (^ A' A"), 




These sensations exist simultaneously and in a state of isolation 
from each other, like a number of little lights which might be lit 
in all the corners of a dark hall. These primitive conscious 
phenomena may, anterior to perception, be of different kinds — 
iSensations, memories, images, — and may have different sources. 
Some may come from an actual impression made upon the 
senses ; others may be introduced by the automatic play of asso- 
ciation in the wake of other phenomena. But, not to complicate 
a problem already too complex, let us consider at first only the 
simplest case, and let us suppose all those elementary phenomena 
to be simple sensations produced by an external modification of 
the organs of sense. 

" (2) An operation of active and actual synthesis by which 
these sensations connect themselves with one another, form a 



The Unity of Consciousness 475 

group, fuse, and are lost in a unique state, to which a principal 
sensation gives its tone, but which probably does not wholly 
resemble any one of its constituent elements. This new phenome- 
non is the perception P. Since this perception comes into being 
at every instant, as a consequence of each new group, and since it 
contains memories as well as sensations, it forms the idea that we 
have of our personality, and after that it can be said that some one 
perceives the images T T' T\ M M' M", etc. The activity that 
thus synthetizes at every moment of life the different psychologi- 
cal phenomena, and that forms our personal perception, must not 
be confounded with the automatic association of ideas. The 
latter, as I have said before, is not an actual activity: it is th^ 
result of a former activity which once synthetized certain phe- 
nomena into an emotion or a unique perception, and which has 
left them with a tendency to reproduce themselves in the same 
order. The perception of which I am now speaking is the syn- 
thesis at the moment of its formation, at the moment when it 
unites new phenomena into a unity at each instant new. 

". . . In a theoretically perfect case, which probably does not 
exist, all the sensations comprised in the first operation, T T' T"^ 
etc., would be united in the perception P, and the man would be 
able to say ' I feel ' with reference to all the phenomena which 
take place in him. But this is never the case, and, in the most 
perfectly constituted of men, there must be a mass of sensations 
produced by the first operation which escape the influence of the 
second. I do not mean sensations which escape the voluntary 
attention and are not comprised in what I may call the field of 
clear vision. I mean sensations which are absolutely unattached 
to the personality and of which the ego does not recognize that it 
is conscious, because, as a matter of fact, it does not contain them. 
In order to represent this to ourselves, let us suppose that, while 
the first operation remains the same, the second operation is modi- 
fied. The power of synthesis can exercise itself, at each moment 
of life, on only a certain number of phenomena, on five, for 
example, and not on twelve. Thus out of the twelve supposed 
sensations, T T' T^ M M' M'\ etc., the ego will perceive only 
the five, T T' M V A. Touching these sensations it will say, 
'I have felt them ; I have been conscious of them.' But if we 
speak to it of the other phenomena, of T^' V A!^ etc., which, 
according to our hypothesis, have also been conscious sensations, 



476 Other Minds y and the Eealm of Mirids 

it will answer that it does not know what we are talking about, 
and that it has known nothing of all that. Now, we have studied 
carefully a particular condition of hysterical subjects and of those 




who suffer from nervous disease in general which I have called 
the contraction of the field of consciousness. This characteristic 
is produced, according to my hypothesis, by this feebleness of 
psychic synthesis carried further than we usually find it ; a 
feebleness which prevents them from uniting into a single per- 
sonal perception a great number of the sensory phenomena which 
really exist in them." ^ 

These simple sensory phenomena not included in any percep- 
tion, but existing each for itself, M. Janet happily describes as 
"mental dust." Their isolation makes them play a very insig- 
nificant role. Each of them carries with it a tendency to move- 
ment, but this is neutralized by their reciprocal conflicts, and 
especially are they held in check by the stronger group of other 
sensations synthetized under the form of personal perception. At 
the most, they are able to produce those slight tremors in the 
muscles, those convulsive contractions of the face, those twitch- 
ings of the fingers, which give a peculiar stamp to many hysterical 
subjects. But if a certain number of them come to be synthetized 
into a second personal perception independent of the former, the 
case becomes very different. We are no longer shut up to the faint 
and uncertain indications of subconscious (which does not mean 
unconscious) mind to which reference has been made above. We 
may have much the same evidence of the existence of a secondary 
personality that we have of the existence of the normal personality, 
and we may freely communicate with it. The two personalities 
divide between them the sensory phenomena, which, however, they 

1 " L'Automatisme Psychologique," pp. 305-308. 



The Unity of Consciousness 477 

may not exhaust. We can picture the state of affairs by the aid 
of the accompanying diagram. 




While M. Janet's subject, Lucie, is conversing in a normal 
way with another person, he succeeds in entering into communi- 
cation with her secondary personality, and carries on a conversa- 
tion in which she bears her part in writing. The writing is 
" automatic " ; that is to say, what is taking place is unknown to 
the normal consciousness of Lucie. The conversation is as fol- 
lows : " Do you hear me ? " " No." " But one must hear in order 
to answer." " Yes, of course." " Then how do you do it? " " I 
don't know." "But there must be some one who hears me." 
"Yes." "Who is it?" "Some one else than Lucie." "Ah! 
another person. Do you want me to give her a name?" " No." 
"Yes, it will be more convenient." "Well, then, Adrienne." 
"Then, Adrienne, do you hear me?" "Yes." Here we have, 
connected with the one organism, the two selves, P and P', each 
indubitably a consciousness, and each cut off from the other as 
one consciousness is always cut off from another. ^ 

I have given M. Janet's doctrine in some detail, because of the 
admirable clearness of his exposition, and because, in his hands, it 
becomes an excellent instrument for rendering intelligible a multi- 
tude of phenomena to which the traditional psychology does scant 
justice. Its fundamental thought is not new, as M. Janet him- 
self points out ; and the reader is already familiar with the con- 
ception of psychic elements knit into unity by a synthetic activity. 

I am not here concerned to defend M. Janet at all points. For 

example, the quantity of " mental dust " we may in a given case 

assume to exist is a question the psychologist must determine by 

the usual method of the interpretation of the physical signs of 

1 " L'Automatisme Psychologique," pp. 314 ff. 



478 Other Mirids, and the Realm of Minds 

mind. He is, of course, in danger of falling into error. But 
making allowance for all this, there remain certain facts which 
appear to be unshakable. We see that a consciousness may be 
relatively simple or relatively complex ; it may embrace few 
psychic elements or many. We see that groups of psychic ele- 
ments may be taken from or added to a consciousness, and that, 
so long as they are a part of it, they share in its unity, whatever 
that may mean. We see that two groups of psychic elements, 
two consciousnesses, may be referred to the one organism ; and 
we have seen that, under certain circumstances, such separate 
groups may coalesce to form but one consciousness. Thus we are 
impelled to distinguish between the psychic elements themselves, 
the content of consciousness, and the unity in which they seem to 
share. This distinction M. Janet brings to the surface in the two 
operations above described. Can the metaphysician follow him ? 
How is he to conceive of the unity of consciousness? What can 
he understand by the words ? 

One thing appears to be very clear. We gain absolutely 
nothing by having recourse to the traditional " substratum " 
self or " unit-being," or to the super-temporal neo-Kantian ac- 
tivity affected by Green. ^ Is it the one self or "activity" 
that is to explain the unity of each of the two consciousnesses 
revealed by the one organism ? Then how does it happen that 
there are two separate consciousnesses ? Is it in each case a 
different self or " activity " ? Then how does it happen that 
the two consciousnesses may melt into one ? Do the selves or 
" activities " telescope ? I recommend the hypothesis to the 
serious consideration of the disciples of Green, for no behavior 
is too eccentric to be attributed to the entity for which he has 
made himself advocate. 

We have seen that M. Janet makes the self or personality to 
consist of a group of psychic elements. There appears to be no 
question of a " substratum " self. This is, so far, good psycho- 
logical doctrine. But we have seen, also, that he conceives this 
group to be synthetized by an activity. Touching this activity 
he writes : " As the ancient philosophers maintained, to exist is 
to act and to create, and consciousness, which is in the highest 
degree a reality, is by that very fact an operating activity. This 
activity, if we seek to represent to ourselves its nature, is above 

1 See Chapter V. 



The Unity of Consciousness 479 

all a synthetic activity which unites a greater or lesser number 
of given phenomena into a new phenomenon differing from its 
elements. This constitutes a veritable creation, for, from every 
possible point of view, 'multiplicity cannot of itself give birth 
to unity,' and the act through which heterogeneous elements are 
united in a new form is not given in the elements. At the 
moment at which, for the first time, a rudimentary creature 
united certain phenomena in order to make of them the vague 
sensation of pain, there was in the world a veritable creation. 
This creation is repeated for every new being which succeeds in 
forming a consciousness of this kind, for, properly speaking, this 
consciousness which has just come into being did not exist in the 
world before and seems to spring from nothing. Consciousness 
is then in itself, from the first moment of its existence, a syn- 
thetic activity." ^ 

This reads, I confess, as though it had been written by one 
touched by the influences that moulded the thought of Green. 
M. Janet has, at the close of his book, abandoned the fields which 
he has cultivated with such signal success, for an excursion upon 
a strip of country over which we are all in danger of wandering 
somewhat at random. One is tempted to ask : Is consciousness 
something different from the totality of mental phenomena? 
And can a consciousness which is created when some creature 
has succeeded in uniting a multiplicity of psychic elements, be 
itself the cause of the synthesis which is, as it seems, the occasion 
of its coming into being ? Is it not the creature which is creative 
cause rather than the consciousness ? Moreover, if consciousness 
is, from the first moment of its existence, a synthetic activity, 
has M. Janet the right to regard the " mental dust " of his first 
operation as consisting of sensations, conscious^ but not grouped 
in such a way as to form a personal perception ? 

However, upon such questions as these I shall not dwell. I 
wish, rather, to discuss a matter which seems to set the whole 
problem of the synthetic ac^vity in a new light. Let us return 
to the above-mentioned psycfliic dust and consider the relation of 
its particles to one another. 

In the last diagram given above, each of the particles of 
mental dust T T"M M"V' is represented as being as completely 
cut off from every other particle and from the personal perceptions 

1 Op. cit., pp. 483-484. 



480 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

P and P', as are the latter from each other. But the latter are 
two distinct consciousnesses, and are related to each other as 
distinct consciousnesses are always related to each other. In 
discussing the doctrine of parallelism I have pointed out^ that 
we are not to fall into the vulgar error of giving to a conscious- 
ness literally a position in space, as though it were a material 
thing ; and I have shown later ^ in what sense, and in what sense 
alone, we may speak of the time and place of mental phenomena. 
To conceive of two minds as side by side each other in space, 
to think of them as near to each other or far from each other, 
because the bodies to which they are referred are separated by a 
lesser or a greater distance, is manifestly absurd. I may measure 
the distance between the two bodies, but it is nonsense to speak 
of measuring the distance between the two minds. Nor is it other- 
wise in the case in which the two minds are referred to the one 
organism. Lucie and Adrienne, as consciousnesses, are no nearer 
to each other than Lucie and M. Janet, or than the President of 
the United States and the Emperor of China. The words near 
and/ar have no significance in such a connection. 

It is clear, then, that we must not take our diagram too se- 
riously. It is easy for me to set down on the one bit of paper 
twelve dots in a row, and to say that the twelve dots represent 
twelve simple sensations, no one of which belongs to the same 
consciousness with any other. It is eas)^ for me to draw lines 
connecting four of these dots with a point P and three others 
with a point P^ I may then say that the four connected 
together in the one case and the three connected together in 
the other represent, respectively, a consciousness consisting of 
four elements and a consciousness consisting of three. The 
dots, as I set them down, may have for me a definite significance. 
Whether a simple sensation may actually have an independent 
existence and constitute a little consciousness all by itself, or 
whether it may not, the conception of such an entity is in no wise 
an absurd one. Who can say how poor in content a consciousness 
may be, and yet continue to exist ? And the groups of dots so 
connected may also have a significance. That a consciousness 
may be complex and may consist of a greater or less number of 
elements, few are tempted to deny. But how shall we conceive of 
the process by which three or four little consciousnesses are fused 
into one larger one ? 

1 Chapter XX. « Chapter XXIV. 



The Unity of Consciousness 481 

It may be said that we may accept the fact that there is a syn- 
thesis without feeling under obligation to describe how it is ac- 
complished. To this I answer, we have no right to use the word 
" synthesis " without having some notion, if only a vague one, of 
what the word means as we use it. I can spread out twelve pebbles 
in a row, and then, by a sweep of my hand, gather together four of 
them. The pebbles exist side by side ; they are parts of the one 
world ; they are separated by distances which can be diminished ; 
I can bring four of them together and leave the rest scattered as 
before. The word " synthesis " has here a meaning. There are the 
moving fingers, which are in the same world with the pebbles, and 
which we regard as agent ; there is a change in the space relations 
of the pebbles, and this we regard as an effect of the activity of the 
agent. Nothing in the transaction is occult ; nothing is incom- 
prehensible. The pebbles were before apart, that is, they were 
separated by greater distances ; they are now together, that is, the 
distances have been diminished. May we suppose that something 
analogous to this must take place if four little consciousnesses 
become one larger one ? Manifestly not. The consciousnesses have 
not been hrought together in any manner even remotely analogous 
to that in which the pebbles have been brought together. They 
were not at a distance from each other before; they were not 
scattered portions of the one world ; they simply belonged to dif- 
ferent orders. Each inhabited, or rather each constituted, a world 
of its own, not continuous with the world constituted by any one 
of the others. How shall we conceive an agent of any sort to 
*' synthetize " such worlds into a larger world ? 

But, one may protest, these little consciousnesses were, at least, 
in some sense apart, and now they are together; may we not leave 
to one side the notion of their being brought together, and simply 
accept the contrasted facts ? I answer, undoubtedly we may ac- 
cept the facts, but it is of no little importance not to misappre- 
hend them. We must dismiss from our mind, at the outset, not 
only all thought of a hand sweeping together a number of pebbles, 
but also all thought of a hand holding together a number of peb- 
bles, which, left to themselves, would fall and scatter. We must 
understand the significance of the words " together " and " apart " 
as applied to mental phenomena. In order to do this, we must 
bring ourselves to a realization of how such distinctions have 
arisen. 

2 I 



482 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

" There is no doubt," writes M. Janet, " that we know psycho- 
logical phenomena in other persons only indirectly, and psychology 
could not begin with this study ; but from actions, gestures, and 
language, we can infer their existence, just as the chemist deter- 
mines the elements of the stars by an inspection of the lines in 
the spectrum ; the certitude attained in the one case is as good as 
that attained in the other." ^ "In reality," he says elsewhere, 
" we never know directly more than the one single consciousness 
— our own at the moment when we perceive it." ^ 

That our acquaintance with consciousness cannot begin in a 
knowledge of other minds is a commonplace of psychology, and I 
suppose no one would care to dispute it. It should not be over- 
looked that this means that our knowledge of mental phenomena 
cannot begin with a knowledge of them as apart. My conscious- 
ness was complex long before I framed even vaguely the notion 
of an eject, and, until I framed this notion, I could not possibly 
conceive of mental phenomena as apart. Could I, then, conceive 
of mental phenomena as together? Yes, if the word is taken to 
mean only that I had a complex consciousness ; no, if it is assumed 
to mean all that it means to the man who has contrasted objects 
with ejects. The man who does this sets objects as a group over 
against a group of another sort ; as thus treated objects become a 
group ; their common share in the relation we are conceiving be- 
tween groups stands out as a thing to be remarked. Had I never 
framed the notion of an eject it is quite conceivable (theoretically) 
that I should have remarked the distinction between physical phe- 
nomena and mental phenomena, though, of course, I could not have 
conceived of physical phenomena as in any sense the common 
property of various minds. But it is not conceivable that I 
should have thought of my mind as a mind in the full meaning of 
the term as we commonly use it. It is one thing to be conscious of 
a multiplicity of mental phenomena, and it is another to recognize 
these as a consciousness — to think of them as together and not 
apart. The problem of the unity of consciousness could not 
emerge as a problem in a mind that had not arisen to the concep- 
tion of an eject. It is in the distinction of object and eject, and 
only in this distinction, that it has its ground of existence. 

Nevertheless, it may be insisted, we do now possess this dis- 
tinction ; we conceive of mental phenomena as together, and we 

1 Op. cit., p. 5. 2 Op. cit., p. 29. 



The Unity of Consciousness 483 

conceive of them as apart ; have we not a right to ask for an ex- 
planation of their being together ? I answer, there is not a whit 
more sense in asking for an explanation of their being together, 
than there is in asking for an explanation of their being apart. 
Indeed, it seems more natural, when one understands the facts in 
the case, to ask for an explanation of their being apart. Is it an 
unnatural thing for consciousness to be complex ? Our first ac- 
quaintance with consciousness is with consciousness as complex ; 
it is only later that we build up a notion of mental phenomena as 
apart. Have we any reason for assuming that, in the nature of 
things, mental elements tend to become ejective to each other, and 
that they will fall apart when let alone ? The assumption of a 
synthetic activity to hold them together is quite as unjustified by 
anything in our experience as would be the assumption of a 
separative activity which forces mental elements into a state of 
isolation. 

If we are to explain the possibility that mental phenomena 
may be objective to each other, then by all means let us show our 
impartiality by also explaining the possibility that mental phe- 
nomena may be ejective to each other ; and let us explain it in the 
same general way, by the assumption of an agent or an activity. 
Empedocles was consistent in assuming as a principle hate, as 
well as love, when he undertook to account for the separation and 
the union of the elements. 

But, although there is no theoretic justification of the assump- 
tion of a synthetic activity to account for the fact that conscious- 
ness may be complex, it does not follow that the impulse which 
leads men to make the gratuitous assumption is itself inexplicable. 
In an earlier chapter ^ I have traced the process of evolution 
which has resulted in the inconceivable synthetic activity of 
Green and other Neo-Kantians. It is a curious illustration of the 
fact that metaphysical misconceptions die very hard. They may 
be starved to mere shadows, they may become abstract absurdities 
so devoid of significance as to offer no resistance to the sword of 
the logician and to lose no blood because they have none to lose ; 
nevertheless there is always some one eager to take them by the 
hand and to offer them a seat at his table. That their behavior is 
eccentric and their conversation incoherent matters nothing ; it is 
their ancestry that constitutes their claim to recognition. 

1 Chapter V. 



484 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

Unreflective man could not but recognize that his body was in 
a certain sense the central point of his experience. With his 
eyes open, he saw other objects than his body ; when he laid his 
hand on things, he felt them ; when his ears were unstopped, he 
heard sounds. Coming to distinguish with some clearness between 
mind and body, men carried over to a new field the relation here 
remarked, and conceived of the mind as knowing the contents of 
consciousness in some analogous manner — as forming a central 
point to which all were related. For a while it seemed satisfactory 
to regard this mind as the substance or substratum manifested by 
mental phenomena, not itself in consciousness. Then, substrata 
of all sorts falling into discredit, the duty of accounting for the 
phenomena of consciousness was laid upon something in conscious- 
ness, the activity discussed in the chapter above alluded to. 
There is no step in these processes of transformation which cannot 
be accounted for when its historic setting is taken into account. 

And at the end of it all where do we find ourselves ? In the 
last stronghold of the old " faculty '* psychology. Many of us 
were in our youth taught to believe that the mind perceived things 
because it had a perceptive faculty ; that it remembered things 
because it had a retentive faculty ; that it could recall what was 
once acquired because it had a reproductive faculty ; and that it 
was in the possession of fundamental truths because it had a regu- 
lative faculty. With the development of psychology as a science 
all this has been swept away. It has been seen that when one 
makes such statements as these, one really says nothing at all, for 
the faculty is a mere name for the facts that one is attempting to 
account for. Nevertheless, we are asked to believe that conscious- 
ness is complex because there is a synthetic activity that makes 
consciousness complex. 

How do we know that there is a synthetic activity making 
consciousness complex ? Evidently because consciousness is com- 
plex. How do we know that such an activity can make con- 
sciousness complex ? Look at the result : consciousness is complex ; 
what can better synthetize than a synthetic activity? In justice to 
those who reason in this way, it is right that I should remind my 
reader that no sensible man would argue thus of his own motion 
and without some propulsion from the ages which lie behind him. 
When a misconception has escaped destruction for a considerable 
time, it inspires a certain amount of respect, as do old people who 



The Unity of Consciousness 485 

are deaf and decrepit, feeble in mind and body, but who at least 
have the merit of being old. After that it does not die, and it 
is not easily killed ; it simply dries up ; and, in calling at the 
houses of one's friends, one finds the withered survival making 
visits in just the places where one would least expect to meet it. 

It is, therefore, not surprising that even acute minds should 
plague themselves with what they call " the problem of the unity 
of consciousness." *^ Nevertheless, there is no such problemf'^ There 
is, of course, the contrast of object and eject, and we must accept 
the fact that a highly complex group of phenomena may be con- 
trasted as object with another group as eject. But the general 
fact that this contrast may be between groups is no more a matter 
calling for explanation than the fact that the contrast may con- 
ceivably be between single mental elements. A problem, to 
which no solution can be given which does not consist in a mere 
restatement of the terms of the problem, is not a genuine prob- 
lem. Why not make the problem even broader than it usually is 
made? Why not ask : How does it happen that there is such a 
thing as consciousness at all ? and why not answer the question 
by the assumption of an activity or faculty which is able to make 
possible a consciousness whether simple or complex? 

In seeking for an explanation of such general facts as these, 
we have evidently stepped beyond the limits of the legitimate 
province of explanation. I have a right to seek for an explana- 
tion of the fact that a particular man at a particular time has 
a sensation of red color. I may point out that he is standing 
with open eyes before a red lamp, and may conclude that his eyes 
and nervous system are normal. That another man standing in 
the same position does not see the lamp as red, I may regard as 
explained when I have studied the phenomena of color blindness, 
and have concluded that there is some defect in the organ of 
vision. Such individual facts are explained when they are re- 
ferred to other individual facts within the system to which all 
the facts belong. But to ask how it can be that, in such a world 
as this, there can be such a thing as a sensation of red, gen- 
erally considered, is to ask a foolish question. The man who asks 
it can expect no better answer than that, in such a world as this, 
there is a reddening activity that is in some occult way responsible 
for the production of sensations of red. When he has received his 
answer, he has heard the echo of his own question, and nothing more. 



486 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

It is the same when we come to study the complexity of con- 
sciousness. That a consciousness of a given degree of complexity 
may be revealed by a certain person at a given time is particular 
fact. It is not absurd to ask for an explanation of such facts, as 
it is not absurd to ask why a particular man does not see a lamp 
to be red when his neighbors do thus see it. We are, to be sure, 
not in a position to give much of an explanation. We know too 
little of the human mind and of its relation to the body to explain 
such facts in detail. It is, however, not inconceivable that we 
may some day know much more, and may be in a position to give 
them what may properly be called an explanation. It seems im- 
possible that a brain at the time when it reveals a normal devel- 
oped consciousness should be in precisely the same condition as it 
is when this consciousness has been robbed of a large part of its 
content. What is the actual condition of the brain in either case 
is unknown to us ; but it may become known. When it is known, 
we shall be able to relate fact to fact and thus explain fact. But 
it is not conceivable that any extension of our knowledge should 
make of any real service in explanation the hypothetical synthetic 
activity which I have discussed above. It is not a new fact ; it is 
a mere form of words. 

It is interesting to note that M. Janet, who is possessed of the 
true instinct of the investigator of nature, and who has a nice 
sense of the meaning of the term "explanation," makes no more 
actual use of the synthetic activity which he assumes, than does 
the student of natural science of the conception of " substratum '* 
in explaining the properties of the bodies which he finds before 
him. In certain hysterical subjects he has observed a tendency 
to "mental disintegration." Does he attempt to point out that, 
in such persons, the mental synthetic activity is in fact weaker 
than in normal persons? Not at all. " La misere psychologique " 
does not betray itself directly as a diminution of synthetic force. 
It is proved to be a " misere " by the fact that the phenomena 
under discussion may make their appearance as a result of hemor- 
rhages, of phthisis, of typhoid fever, of the administering of toxic 
substances ; as also by the fact that they may be made to disap- 
pear sometimes by making the subject eat and sleep, thus inducing 
a condition of increased bodily vigor. ^ 

This is a legitimate attempt at explanation. Facts are con- 
1 Op. cit., p. 463. 



I 



The Unity of Consciousness 487 

nected with facts, and a basis is laid for a science. If what takes 
place in the brain is unknown, at least mental phenomena may be 
explained by a reference to facts which stand at one or two 
removes from them. It is thus that we explain a man's anger 
when we find that some one has trodden upon his toe, or his grief 
when a telegram has been put into his hands. The synthetic 
activity has plainly so little to do with the whole matter that its 
presence can be explained in M. Janet's volume, and in many other 
works by acute and erudite authors, only as a survival, and as a 
testimony to the conservative tendencies in human nature. 



CHAPTER XXX 
SUBCONSCIOUS MIND 

We hear a great deal, at the present day, about subconscious 
mind, and it is worth our while to delay a little over the signifi- 
cance of the phrase. It is important to remark that the phrase 
is an ambiguous one, and may easily betray the man who uses it 
incautiously into saying what is absurd and meaningless. 

We have seen in the preceding chapters that more than the 
one consciousness may be referred to the one organism. We may 
accept one of the consciousnesses as the normal one, and class 
together all the other mental phenomena, whose presence may 
seem to be indicated, as subconscious. 

Of course, when we speak thus, we should not mean that the 
mental phenomena in question are not mental phenomena. Ex- 
clusion from a given consciousness does not imply the anni- 
hilation of the phenomena excluded, whether we are concerned 
with groups of phenomena referred to two or more different or- 
ganisms or with groups of phenomena referred to the one organ- 
ism. Nor does exclusion from a given consciousness seem to be 
in itself a reason for denying that the mental phenomena in ques- 
tion are just the sort of mental phenomena with Avhich each of 
us is directly acquainted — for denying that they constitute a 
consciousness. The existence of the phenomena in question has 
not been gratuitously assumed. They have been proved to exist 
by the adduction of precisely the same sort of evidence as has 
been adduced to prove that there exist consciousnesses related 
to the bodies of other men. The adjective subconscious does 
not seem to be well chosen when it is used in the description 
of such phenomena. It may, it is true, serve to point out that 
they are to be recognized as excluded from a given consciousness, 
but it certainly suggests that the phenomena in question differ 
in kind from those with which we are familiar ; subconscious may 
easily be understood to mean unconscious. 

488 



Subconscious Mind 489 

Again. I have earlier^ dwelt upon the fact that all that is 
present in consciousness at any one time is not recognized as 
present with the same degree of clearness and vividness. Some 
things stand out distinctly and unmistakably, and some lie in 
comparative obscurity. An element in our experience which has 
occupied, so to speak, the foreground of consciousness, may come 
to lose its prominence, and may pass gradually into an obscurity 
which makes it difficult to be sure that it is present in conscious- 
ness at all. A careful study of those elements which compose 
the dim background of our conscious life, a study which cannot 
be carried out by the aid of direct introspection alone, seems to 
reveal the fact that, in thus losing their vividness, our conscious 
experiences do not approach, and finally reach, a definitely marked 
threshold which can be perceived to limit their downward prog- 
ress. We do not find that they reach a clear line, and are sud- 
denly cut off ; we find rather that they pass into a misty region 
in which their existence or non-existence at a given time may be 
a legitimate subject of dispute, and may have to be established 
laboriously, perhaps rather uncertainly, and by the employment 
of roundabout methods of proof. In other words, the limits of 
our conscious life are not well-defined limits ; it fades out gradu- 
ally, and is not seen to cease abruptly. 

Now the term " subconscious " may be used to describe a sen- 
sation which is thus dimly existent, a sensation so faint that we 
can prove it to exist only indirectly and without the highest con- 
fidence in our conclusion. It is evident that, when we thus use 
the term, the limits of its application must be a matter of conven- 
tion. How dim and faint must a sensation be to have a right 
to be classed as subconscious ? We are concerned with the ques- 
tion of degree, and not with the question of kind. We recognize 
subconscious sensations as differing from one another, and as 
differing from conscious sensations, just as the latter differ among 
themselves. There are differences of vividness all along the line •, 
nature does not make a flying leap which enables us to say offhand 
that a sensation must be relegated to the one class or to the other. 

There is, however, still another sense in which men may con- 
ceive, and have conceived, mental elements to be subconscious. 
They may conceive them to be, not other consciousness nor a dim 
consciousness, but actually unconscious. 

1 Chapter III. 



490 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

I cannot better bring this view before my reader than by 
using as an illustration the doctrine of Sir William Hamilton,^ 
who maintains the existence of unconscious mental modifications, 
and supports his position by urging a variety of considerations. 
Sir William distinguishes between consciousness and the mental 
phenomena of which consciousness takes cognizance. He com- 
pares consciousness to an inner light, which illumines unequally 
the varied content with which it has to do. Some of the phe- 
nomena receive its full brilliance, and are known clearly and 
vividly ; some receive but a moderate degree of illumination 
and are less vividly perceived. But the things of which con- 
sciousness takes cognizance whether vividly or dimly do not 
constitute by any means the whole furniture of the mind. There 
is much that is latent, much that lies quite beyond the bounds of 
consciousness and can only be inferred to exist. Among such 
latent mental furniture Hamilton classes all those things which 
we regard ourselves as knowing, — sciences, languages, and the 
like, — but of which we may not happen to be thinking at a given 
time. " The infinitely greater part of our spiritual treasures," 
he writes, "lies always beyond the sphere of consciousness, hid 
in the obscure recesses of the mind." This he calls the first 
degree of latency. 

The second degree exists when the mind contains certain sys- 
tems of knowledge, or certain habits of action, which it is uncon- 
scious of possessing when in its ordinary state, but which are 
revealed to consciousness in certain extraordinary exaltations of 
its powers. Thus, in madness, febrile delirium, somnambulism, 
etc., it may be revealed that the mind is in possession of that 
which, under normal circumstances, it could not be suspected of 
possessing. The extinct memory of whole languages may be 
suddenly restored, and the subject of the disorder may be 
found capable of repeating accurately, in known or unknown 
tongues, passages which were never within the grasp of the 
memory in the normal state.^ 

The third degree or class embraces the mental modifications, 
of which we are unconscious, but which manifest their existence 

1 " Lectures on Metaphysics." See especially Lecture XVIII, but see also XI, 
XIII, XIV, and XVII. 

2 It is beKide my purpose to comment upon the much discussed illustrations 
which Hamilton brings forward in support of this second degree of latence. 



Subconscious Mind 491 

by effects of which we are conscious. For the existence of such 
Hamilton adduces evidence of three kinds. 

His first argument is as follows : " You are of course aware, 
in general, that vision is the result of the rays of light, reflected 
from the surface of objects to the eye ; a greater number of rays 
is reflected from a larger surface ; if the superficial extent of an 
object, and, consequently, the number of rays which it reflects, 
be diminished beyond a certain limit, the object becomes invisible ; 
and the minimum visihile is the smallest expanse which can be seen, 
— which can consciously affect us, — which we can be conscious 
of seeing. This being understood, it is plain that if we divide 
this minimum visihile into two parts, neither half can, by itself, be 
an object of vision, or visual consciousness. They are, severally 
and apart, to consciousness as zero. But it is evident, that each 
half must, by itself, have produced in us a certain modification, 
real though unperceived ; for as the perceived whole is nothing 
but the union of the unperceived halves, so the perception — the 
perceived affection itself of which we are conscious — is only the 
sum of two modifications, each of which severally eludes our 
consciousness. When we look at a distant forest, we perceive a 
certain expanse of green. Of this, as an affection of our organism, 
we are clearly and distinctly conscious. Now, the expanse of 
which we are conscious is evidently made up of parts of which we 
are not conscious. No leaf, perhaps no tree, may be separately 
visible. But the greenness of the forest is made up of the green- 
ness of the leaves ; that is, the total impression of which we are 
conscious is made up of an infinitude of small impressions of which 
we are not conscious." ^ 

So it is in the case of every sense. The distant murmur of the 
sea is a sum made up of parts, and the sum would be as nothing if 
the individual parts did not count as something. The noise of 
each wave, at the distance supposed, is inaudible, but we must 
assume that it produces a mental effect beyond consciousness, or 
there would be no hearing of the murmur. 

A second argument is drawn from the fact that one thought 
may immediately suggest another with which it does not appear 
to be bound by any link of association which would account for 
the transition. For example, the thought of Ben Lomond is imme- 
diately followed in Hamilton's mind by the thought of the Prus- 

1 Lecture XVIII. 



492 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

sian system of education. There appears to be no connection 
between the ideas. A little reflection, however, recalls to him the 
fact that, on his last visit to the mountain, he met with a German 
ii^entleman ; and he concludes that he may interpolate three sub- 
merged links of association between the two conscious ideas the 
lack of connection betw^een which puzzles him. These three links 
are the German, Germany, and Prussia; they remain in the region 
of the unconscious, and betray their existence only by what they 
do in consciousness. 

The last argument is drawn from the field of our acquired 
habits and dexterities. We learn to play on the piano, for 
example, slowly and laboriously. At first every movement must 
receive individual attention. But there comes a time when, 
although we are conscious in a general way of what we are doing, 
and will to perform the series of movements as a series, yet we are 
not conscious of the separate movements individually. Such facts 
as these must be explained as follows : " Some minimum of time 
must be admitted as the condition of consciousness ; and as time is 
divisible ad infinitum^ whatever minimum be taken, there must be 
admitted to be, beyond the cognizance of consciousness, intervals 
of time in which, if mental agencies be performed, these will be 
latent to consciousness. If we suppose that the minimum of time 
to which consciousness can descend, be an interval called six, and 
that six different movements be performed in this interval, these, 
it is evident, will appear to consciousness as a single indivisible 
point of modified time ; precisely as the minimum visihile appears as 
an indivisible point of modified space. And as in the extended 
parts of the minimum visihile each must determine a certain modi- 
fication on the percipient subject, seeing that the effect of the 
whole is only the conjoined effect of its parts, in like manner 
the protended parts of each conscious instant, — of each distin- 
guishable minimum of time, — though themselves beyond the ken 
of consciousness, must contribute to give the character to the 
whole mental state which that instant, that minimum, comprises. 
This being understood, it is easy to see how we lose the conscious- 
ness of the several acts in the rapid succession of many of our 
habits and dexterities. At first, and before the habit is acquired, 
every act is slow, and we are conscious of the effort of deliberation, 
choice, and volition ; by degrees the mind proceeds with less vac- 
illation and uncertainty ; at length the acts become secure and 



Subconscious Mind 493 

precise ; in proportioD as this takes place, the velocity of the pro- 
cedure is increased, and as this acceleration rises, the individual 
acts drop one by one from consciousness, as we lose the leaves in 
retiring farther and farther from the tree, and, at last, we are only 
aware of the general state which results from these unconscious 
operations, as we can at last only perceive the greenness which 
results from the unperceived leaves." ^ 

I have thought it worth while to dwell upon Hamilton's doc- 
trine because he discusses so clearly the theory of the existence of 
unconscious mental elements that his statement of it has by no 
means been superseded by what has been said on the subject 
since.2 Recent advances in the science of psychology furnish 
added reasons for rejecting his conclusions, but no considerations 
have been advanced in support of the theory which are distinctly 
different in kind from those urged by Sir William more than half 
a century ago. 

Before discussing his position let me point out that it is incom- 
patible with the account of consciousness given in this volume. 

It recognizes a region of mind which may properly be called 
unconscious. It distinguishes between consciousness itself and 
the various elements of which it takes cognizance ; for example, 
between the consciousness of having a sensation of blue color and 
the sensation of blue color in itself considered. But conscious- 
ness, as I have used the term, is but a name for the whole body 
of sensations and ideas and the relations which obtain between 
them. It is not something superadded to these and numericall}^ 
distinct from them. It is not an inner light, nor a peculiar 
activity, nor a limited region in which things appear and from 
which they pass to continue their existence in some region of a 
different kind. Consciousness is in no wise to be distinguished 
from the things in consciousness, and the word is but a conven- 
ient term to denote these things taken as a whole. I shall not here 
repeat what I have said elsewhere ^ in justification of this use of 
the term. I shall merely remind the reader that it has been 
rather a common failing among the philosophers to distinguish 
between the wood and the trees in the wood, and then to miscon- 
ceive the distinction. 

1 Lecture XIX. 3 Chapter IV. 

2 There is, moreover, a certain convenience in taking for criticism a statement 
with which I may assume many of my readers to be familiar. 



494 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

But let us turn to a more detailed criticism of Sir William's 
doctrine, and let us consider first the first two degrees of latency 
for which he argues. Every one admits that the storehouse of 
memory is full of things of which, at a given time, we may not 
happen to be thinking, and sometimes phenomena are brought to 
our notice which lead us to suspect that it is much fuller than we 
commonly suppose it to be. In writing the last sentence I have 
made use of a metaphor drawn from the field of material existence, 
and there is no objection to my doing so, provided my metaphor 
— a common one — does not mislead me. When I speak of my 
spiritual treasures as " hid in the obscure recesses of the mind," 
I may mean nothing more than that I may recollect many things 
which I do not at all times recollect ; and, if I mean nothing 
more, I am expressing an undoubted truth. If, however, I mean 
to maintain that all the mental experiences which have ever had a 
place in my consciousness continue to exist from that time on, 
somewhat as did the treasures which Ali Baba found concealed in 
the robbers' cave, I make a statement which should by no means 
be accepted without careful examination. 

Nevertheless, such is Sir William Hamilton's conception of the 
contents of the memory. They lie in the dark until such time as 
something serves to draw them once more into the light ; that 
they do exist in the dark is evidenced by the fact that it is pos- 
sible to recover them ; one cannot recover the non-existent. The 
matter appears to be so plain to Sir William, that he does not find 
it necessary to adduce any argument in favor of the continued 
existence of past experiences except the fact of recollection. 

Now it will be remembered that, in Chapter XXVIII, I spoke 
of consciousness as being protennively extended. I pointed out 
that we do not consider the consciousness of a man to be a thing 
of the moment merely ; it may stretch over a number of years. 
We conceive of the total consciousness as an indefinite series of 
phenomena, most of which are past, some of which are present. 
Each experience has some definite place in the series; it is tlie 
experience of a given moment, and two similar experiences can be 
distinguished as two from the fact that they are referred to differ- 
ent points in the series. If I have a toothache on a certain day 
in my twenty-first year, and a very similar toothache on a certain 
day in my forty-first, I am in no danger of supposing that the 
two experiences are strictly identical, i.e. that I have had but the 



I 



Subconscious Mind 495 

one experience. One cannot have the one experience on two differ- 
ent occasions — that is not what we mean by the one experience. 

Thus the experience of the one moment is never identical with 
the experience of another. This fact is perfectly well recognized 
by the psychologists, who are continually telling us that a "feel- 
ing " once gone, can never return ; it can only be replaced by 
another feeling. And the fact is recognized just as clearly by Sir 
William himself, who takes exception energetically to Reid's doc- 
trine that memory is an immediate knowledge of the past. A 
thing can only be immediately known, he argues, if it be known 
in itself, and it can only be known in itself if it be actually 
existent. But the past is past, and cannot be existent. Memory 
is an act of knowledge, and can only be cognizant of a now-exist- 
ent object. Hence we must conclude that memory is not an im- 
mediate but a mediate knowledge of the past.^ All of which is 
Sir William's way of recognizing the fact that it is proper to 
draw a distinction between a past experience and the present 
thought of the past experience, as it certainly is. 

It appears, then, that the experience which is actually present 
in an act of recollection is not the original experience at all, but 
is a new one, and that every moment must have its own experi- 
ence, which cannot be transferred to the next moment. What 
would we think of Ali Baba's powers of reasoning if he argued as 
follows touching some cave of his own : I put a certain bale of 
goods into my cave and shut the door ; whenever I open it, I find 
a different bale there ; ergo, my bale must exist continuously in 
the cave ? To do Ali Baba full justice, we must suppose that, in 
addition to the experiences we are supposing him to have, he has 
certain information that no one bale of goods can exist in two 
successive instants, but that each fills its instant and is followed 
by a successor, at least so long as bales are kept under observation. 

Perhaps one will defend Ali Baba by saying that, if bales are 
followed by bales in this way, at least he may assume that the 
bale he sees when he opens the door is the lineal descendant of 
the one he put in, and that there has been no moment at which 
there did not exist some representative of the line. Similarly, 
some one willing to defend Hamilton may say that, although it is 
absurd to speak seriously of anything once in consciousness as 
"coming back again," seeing that a past experience is a past 

1 Lecture XII. 



496 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

experience and the past can never be made present, yet the mere 
fact that I can now have the conscious experience that I call a 
memory proves that between it and the past conscious experience 
of which it is the memory there has been an unbroken series of 
unconscious experiences which makes the connection possible. 

But how prove such a statement ? The memory itself appears 
to testify to the existence of a certain conscious experience at a 
definite point in the past. It is silent as to the intermediate series 
of unconscious existences. My only argument for their existence 
appears to be the assumption of an analogy between facts of con- 
sciousness and material things — I put half a dozen chairs into 
a room, I take them out again ; I repeat the operation, always I 
am handling the same chairs, and I know that I cannot get out of 
a room chairs that are not in it. May it not be so with conscious 
experiences, mental phenomena? I have an experience, I forget 
it, or rather I allow it to pass from consciousness ; then I revive it, 
and it is back again in consciousness. Could it come back unless 
it were really one of my possessions? 

Now, if one will reflect upon the account of the nature of 
material things which I have given in earlier chapters in this 
volume, one will see that the analogy does not hold at all. No 
one means by a material object, for example, a chair, any single 
experience of such an object in a consciousness. A man may 
claim, when he has a given experience, that he sees a chair, and 
he may equally well claim on another occasion, when he has 
another and a different experience, that he sees the same chair. 
In saying this he does not in the least mean that the two experi- 
ences are identical. He means that they both are recognized as 
belonging to a certain complex group of experiences so related 
that each experience may for certain purposes be taken as repre- 
sentative of all the rest. The individual experiences sink into 
insignificance, it is the group that is regarded as important. And 
the group is given a place in a much larger complex still, the 
external world, in which its right to hold its place is conceived to 
be quite independent of the fact that any part of it is actually 
given in perception to any one. Hence it is not nonsense to say 
that a chair exists when no one is perceiving it. It is not non- 
sense to say that we take out of a room the same chair that we 
put into it. In speaking thus we are referring to a great com- 
plex of experiences and to relations which obtain within it. We 



i 



Subco7iscious Mind 497 

are abstracting from the fact that we, at a given time, may be 
intuitively conscious of this or that representative of the complex. 

When we are dealing with mental phenomena, as mental phe- 
nomena, we are not directly concerned with any such construct. 
It is true, we group a collection of mental phenomena together 
and call it a mind. But when we have cleared away from our 
notion of a mind all that is due to the natural tendency to con- 
ceive of a mind after the analogy of a material thing, we find that 
we mean by a mind nothing more than a consciousness, a greater 
or smaller group of experiences referred to a material body in the 
way described in Chapter XXIII. In this group we do not find 
any mental "things " analogous to material things — lesser group- 
ings of such a nature that we find ourselves regarding the group 
as present when one of its elements is present, or saying that the 
one thing continues to exist because a given experience is present 
at the one time and a different experience at another. There are 
no mental " things " of this sort, either to the philosopher or to 
the plain man. Mental phenomena are treated individualistically, 
and find their place in the whole system of our experiences 
through the reference to the one great system which introduces 
order into all our experiences, the system of material things. 

It is a recognition of this fact that leads the psychologist to 
deny that a feeling can ever recur ; it is a recognition of it that 
had led Sir William Hamilton to deny that a present memory can 
be identical with a past experience of w^hich it is the memory. 
It is a temporary forgetfulness of this fact that leads men to 
speak of the past as " brought back," or of a forgotten experience 
as " revived." Thus, the statement that it would be impossible to 
recall a past experience, were the experience in question not 
retained in the treasure-house of the mind, is seen to draw all 
its plausibility from the assumption that mental phenomena, like 
material things, may have a continued existence quite distinguish- 
able from thQ existence of the individual experiences in which 
such phenomena are revealed, which is absurd. The mental 
phenomena are individual experiences^ and there is no such dis- 
tinction possible. For the existence of mental facts there are 
only two kinds of evidence : the fact may be given in conscious- 
ness, or it may be inferred to exist as an eject. But each mental 
fact has its own time and place of existing,^ and cannot exist in 

1 See Chapter XXIV. 



498 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

two times or in two places. To prove it to exist at all, there 
must be evidence that it exists at the particular time and place 
appropriate to it. To prove that it existed at a given time, and 
then to say that it probably continued to exist after that, is absurd. 
The mental experience of each moment must be guaranteed by its 
own evidence, and we must not allow ourselves to be misled by 
a false analogy. This matter will perhaps become clearer in the 
next chapter, which will discuss the eternity of matter and the 
conservation of energy. I hope it will then become plain that we 
do not, in fact, conceive of minds as we do of material things. 

It will be argued, perhaps, that in the rest of Sir William 
Hamilton's arguments for latent mental facts there is offered 
what seems to be direct proof that such facts are in existence at 
a given moment. After the thought of Ben Lomond comes the 
thought of the Prussian school-system ; may we not supply the 
subconscious links, the Grerman^ Germany^ and Prussia? Are 
we not here making a legitimate inference ? 

Before admitting this, it is well to call before the mind all 
possible alternatives. In the first place, we should remember 
that what we call the laws of association rest upon certain ob- 
served facts. We notice that ideas follow one another in a given 
order, and we formulate the result of our observations. The law 
thus attained is an empirical one, and has no greater authority 
than the observations upon which it is based. I observe that 
when B has followed A, and C has followed B once, it is not un- 
reasonable to expect that the thought of A will call up the 
thought of B, and that thought the thought of C. But suppose 
that I find, on various occasions, that the thought of C follows the 
thought of A immediately. Shall I assume that my first formu- 
lation, which makes each member in the series suggest only tlie 
next member, was an exhaustive account of the process, and shall 
I determine to adjust my later observations to this by the assump- 
tion of the presence of a link which does not seem to be present ? 
Or shall I modify my first formulation of the law in such a way 
as to bring it into harmony with my later observations ? In the 
absence of any other considerations than those mentioned, surely 
the latter seems the more reasonable method of procedure. 

Again. In Hamilton's day certain parts of the psychological 
field had been very inadequately cultivated. Such a conception 
of a consciousness or of consciousnesses connected with a single 



Subconscious Mind 499 

organism as we have seen presented in Professor Janet's work 
would have seemed to Sir William monstrous. Is not the ego 
one and indivisible ? All the mental phenomena, which we have 
any reason to refer to the mind connected with a single body, 
must be referred to the one ego. If it does not possess them con- 
sciously, then it must possess them unconsciously ; they must be 
unconscious mental modifications ; what else can they be ? 

Thus may a man be misled by the adoption of a metaphysical 
theory. But one who has freed himself from this ancient preju- 
dice, and has gained some idea of subconscious mind, in the first 
sense of the words discussed in this chapter, need feel under no 
obligation to assume unconscious ideas of any sort to serve as a 
link of association between two conscious ideas. I have no de- 
sire to defend the existence of the German, Germany, and Prussia 
in the illustration discussed above, but to one who feels that certain 
ideas not in a consciousness must sometimes be assumed in order to 
account for certain other ideas in that consciousness, I may point 
out that in the phenomena of post-hypnotic suggestion we have 
evidence of the fact that ideas cut off from a given consciousness 
as one consciousness is cut off from another may make their pres- 
ence felt in the consciousness in question ; and, in this case, we 
have very good reason for believing that they are not uncon- 
scious ideas at all. 

To make my list ' of possible alternatives complete, perhaps I 
should suggest that the German, Germany, and Prussia may really 
have made their appearance in Sir William's consciousness without 
his knowing it. That is to say, they may have been subconscious 
in the second sense — they may have been dim and fleeting expe- 
riences which served to make possible a transition to another idea, 
but which failed to attract the attention and which thus escaped 
unnoticed. One of the weaknesses of the old psychology was its 
failure to recognize how gross and inadequate an instrument direct 
introspection is. 

As to the arguments drawn from the minimum visihile and 
from our acquired dexterities, they are palpably unsound. I can- 
not assume that, because I can from a distance see a great expanse 
of green color, I may conclude that every separate leaf concerned 
in the total effect has its distinct and separate influence in produc- 
ing a " mental modification," an influence which it would exercise 
in the absence of every other leaf. In assuming such an exact 



oOO Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

quantitative parallel between objective stimulus and resultant 
sensation, Sir William has evidently gone far beyond what is 
justified by our actual knowledge of the facts in the case. 

The relations of the human body to those things that act upon 
it are by no means so simple as this. A large dose of a given 
drug may be injurious to the body ; a small dose may produce 
an effect of a wholly different kind. A given quantity of food 
will result in an increase of weight ; doubling the quantity will 
not necessarily double the gain, and it may result in a disorder 
that will actually diminish it. Within certain limits we discern 
objects more clearly when the light under which they are seen 
is made to increase in intensity, but it is obvious that this relation 
between intensity of illumination and the clearness with which we 
see things does not hold indefinitely. It is quite conceivable that 
the external stimulus applied to one of the organs of sense must 
reach a certain magnitude, extensive or intensive, before there is 
such a nervous reaction as is accompanied by any sensation what- 
ever. A lesser stimulus than this may have its parallel in the 
weight in the scale insufficient to cause in the balance any motion 
at all. 

By the minimum visihile Sir William appears to have meant 
the least thing directly revealed by introspection as given in per- 
ception. It is by no means self-evident that a lesser thing than 
this may not affect consciousness, may not be subconsciously 
perceived in the second sense of the word "subconscious." If, 
however, we understand by the minimum visihile the least visual 
stimulus that can affect consciousness at all, — it would be ex- 
ceedingly difficult to prove anything a minimuin visihile in this 
sense, — then we ought to prove, and not assume, if we wish to 
be Hamiltonians, that a lesser stimulus than this has an effect of 
any sort that may properly be called mental. 

Hamilton's explanation of the fact that actions performed habit- 
ually tend to " drop from consciousness " has the same defect as 
the argument just criticised. He assumes, and does not prove, 
that an interval of time too short to be represented in conscious 
mind may be represented in unconscious mind. His explanation, 
moreover, overlooks the fact that even actions performed slowly, 
if they be performed frequently enough, may come to be per- 
formed unconsciously. The motions of a man in a brown study 
are not necessarily hurried. 



Subconscious Mind 501 

The man who seeks to interpret the significance of a series 
of actions which has come to be performed " unconsciously " has 
various hypotheses from which to choose. He may, in a par- 
ticular case, be inclined to believe that the series was not really 
absent from consciousness, but had its place in that dim region of 
consciousness which secures little attention and is apt to be over- 
looked. On the other hand, he may have reason to believe that 
the series was really absent from consciousness, — the normal con- 
sciousness which is to us the consciousness, — but may conclude, 
nevertheless, that it was represented in a consciousness. That it 
is possible to refer more than one consciousness to the one nervous 
system we have seen. If the reaction to a particular sense-stim- 
ulus has been very rapid, as when a note is struck by the finger 
in response to the glance which the accomplished piano-player 
casts upon the sheet before him, he may argue that the incoming 
message has been the occasion of the immediate despatch of an 
outgoing message to the muscles from some lower centre in the 
brain, and that the cortex, the seat of the normal consciousness 
of the man, has not been concerned in the result. That the 
disturbance of the lower centre has been accompanied by con- 
sciousness it is not absurd for him to believe. That the lower 
centres may be trained to perform, when functioning indepen- 
dently, actions which they could not have performed had the 
cortex not originally had a finger in the matter, the physiologist 
does not find incredible. 

Whether such actions as these are to be looked upon as accom- 
panied by consciousness is, of course, a fair question. To the 
hypothesis that certain "unconscious" actions are evidence of 
other-consciousness one may prefer the doctrine that they point 
to the existence of no mental facts of any sort. One may main- 
tain that we are in the presence of a mere mechanism, not a 
mechanism with psychic parallels. This doctrine may be pushed 
to an extreme, as it is in the works of Dr. Despine,^ who, although 
well acquainted with the phenomena of hypnotism, finds it pos- 
sible to maintain that a subject capable of speaking, of answering 
questions intelligently, of showing preferences, of refusing to 
obey orders, etc., is a bit of mechanism wholly without con- 
sciousness while doing such things as these. It is possible to go 
but one step farther than this, and that is to deny any conscious- 
1 "[fetude scientifique sur le Somnambulisme," Paris, 1880. 



502 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

ness to one's laboratory assistant and to the members of one's 
own family. 

But if it is absurd to deny the presence of consciousness in 
the face of such overwhelming evidence, it does not follow that 
we may assume that all so-called automatic actions indicate the 
presence of consciousness somewhere. Whether certain of them 
do so or not is a question upon which one may well prefer to 
reserve judgment. The evidence for other minds and the deter- 
mination of their nature are, as we have seen,^ matters touching 
which it is well to judge with caution and to speak with modesty. 

In discussing Sir William Hamilton's arguments I have, for 
convenience, spoken as though the unconscious mental facts for 
which he argues were, at least, something conceivable. But it 
should be borne in mind that we know no mental facts directly 
save conscious mental facts. Our argument for the existence of 
mental facts of which we are not directly conscious — for ejects 
— is an argument from analogy. If it proves the existence of 
anything, it proves the existence of conscious mental facts, or, as I 
should prefer to say, of consciousness. How one should undertake 
to prove the existence of an unconscious mental fact I cannot con- 
ceive, nor, for that matter, how one should make clear to oneself 
what one means by the expression. 

It may be said, this inability arises out of the assumption 
that consciousness is nothing but a name for the mental facts 
themselves. Once distinguish, as Hamilton and others have done, 
between consciousness and the facts of which consciousness takes 
cognizance, and it is not impossible to realize what may be meant 
by an unconscious mental fact ; abstract in thought the conscious- 
ness from an ordinary sensation, and what is left is an uncon- 
scious sensation. The thing seems simple, on the surface ; but we 
should not overlook the fact that this suggested operation has no 
analogy with the processes of abstraction as commonly performed. 
When one has abstracted consciousness from a sensation, is one 
conscious of the sensation ? Manifestly not ; it disappears, by 
hypothesis, from the realm of the known. Then how can one 
know what is left when consciousness has been abstracted from 
a sensation ? When consciousness is abstracted, nothing is left ; 
or, at least, nothing appears to be left, and the assumption that 
something is left seems to be no better than a gratuitous assump- 

1 Chapter XXVIII. 



Subconscious Mind 503 

tion of one knows not what. But it is not worth while to 
pick a fresh quarrel here with the man who is resolved to regard 
consciousness as an inner light or a supernormal activity. I 
leave him to his own devices. 

It may seem surprising that, in discussing the subject of 
unconscious sensations, I have not turned to the extensive 
psycho-physical literature through which the student of psychol- 
ogy feels it his duty to wade at some point in his course. I have 
not done so because the gain, for the purpose in hand, would have 
been small. Still, it seems hardly right to pass over the whole 
thing in silence, and I shall, pour acquit de conscience^ say a few 
words touching the negative sensations which have received so 
much attention in psycho-physical literature. 

Let us assume that it is possible to determine the least phys- 
ical stimulus that is capable of giving rise to a conscious sensation 
of a given class. Let us further assume that the increments of 
sensation which correspond to certain definite increments in the 
stimulus can be determined with accuracy. We have now before 
us a series of sensations, beginning with one just perceptible, 
and we have a series of stimuli corresponding to the sensations. 
The quantity of sensation increases as the stimulus increases, and 
we may naturally ask ourselves. What is the law which expresses 
the general relation between stimulus and sensation ? Reasoning 
upon such a basis of assumptions as is above indicated, Fechner, 
the father of psycho-physics, concluded that the sensations vary in 
the same proportion as the logarithms of their respective stimuli. 

With the justice of his assumptions and with the accuracy of 
his law, we need not here concern ourselves. It is enough to 
remark that Fechner thought he had found some law which 
expressed the quantitative relations which obtain between sen- 
sations and their appropriate stimuli. If we assume this law 
to be a general law, we ought, by its aid, to be able to determine 
by calculation the particular sensation which must correspond to 
a particular stimulus, even in cases where direct experience of 
the sensation is out of the question. Given a limited number 
of sensations in the same series, and given the stimuli which 
correspond to these respectively, we may graphically represent 
the relations which obtain between them all by treating the 
sensations as points upon a curve. When the equation of a 
curve is once known, the curve can be produced mathematically, 



504 Other Minds , and the Realm of Minds 

for it is possible to determine what ought to be the exact location 
of every point in it. And as the points in the curve represent, 
in the present case, sensations, it is apparent that we may deter- 
mine exactly what sensation must correspond to any given 
stimulus whatever. 

Now, the series of sensations appears to begin abruptly in a 
certain sensation, the least sensation that we can consciously 
perceive, the first sensation above the "threshold" of conscious- 
ness. The stimulus that corresponds to this sensation has a 
certain magnitude. Suppose a stimulus of a lesser magnitude 
than this, may we conclude that anything in the world of sensa- 
tion corresponds to it ? Why not ? Is it not true that sensations 
vary as the logarithms of their respective stimuli ? May not a 
curve approach a given line, touch it, and pass below it ? The 
points in the curve which lie above the line in question may be 
given positive values, there is a zero point where the line is 
crossed, and the points in the curve which lie below the line 
must be given negative values. Every point, whether positive or 
negative, has its position determined in the same way by the 
equation of the curve. Why may one, then, not speak of a zero 
sensation below the least perceptible sensation, and of a series of 
negative sensations which stretch below this and correspond to the 
diminishing values of the stimulus all the way to zero ? Fechner 
has a good deal to say about these negative sensations. 

But what does he mean by these negative sensations which he 
calls unconscious, and which he supposes to correspond to stimuli 
too weak to produce a conscious sensation ? He admits that the 
phrase "unconscious sensations" is, taken literally, mere non- 
sense, and he does not wish us to take it literally.^ May we 
assume that he understands negative sensations to be mere sym- 
bols of the degree of physical resistance which is to be overcome 
before a sensation can appear in consciousness at all ? He repels 
the insinuation, though he certainly sometimes speaks as though 
this were his thought. Will he have us suppose that negative 
sensations are actual existences of some sort ? This seems to be 
intended when lie makes the suggestion that such sensations may 
have their place in the consciousness of a world-spirit capable of 
being affected by weaker stimuli than are Imman beings — an odd 
conceit which would make the curve of sensation lie partly in one 
1 " In Sachen der Psycho-physik," Leipzig, 1877, a. 04. 



Subconscious Mind 505 

consciousness and partly in another. It is difficult to think, as 
one reads him, that he had any clear idea of what he really meant. 

Perhaps it does not matter very much what he really did mean, 
for the argument for negative sensations is so poor that it is not 
worth while to take it too seriously. It is, at bottom, the mini- 
mum visihile argument of Hamilton, and is not the more worthy 
of respect because it has borrowed a mathematical formula to 
cover its nakedness. Even were it true that, within certain 
limits, sensations varied as the logarithms of their respective 
stimuli, it would be the height of absurdity to jump to the con- 
clusion that this relation must hold good semper et uhique^ and 
that there are no limits to the system. When one's faith in a 
formula goes so far as to lead one to piece out a series of con- 
scious sensations by a series of unconscious sensations, it is time 
to begin a reexamination of one's reasonings. 

I shall not delay longer over arguments for unconscious mind. 
I know of none, whether urged by Fechner or by others, that are 
worthy of being taken seriously. We have seen, however, that 
there are two senses of the word " subconscious " in which it is 
not absurd to talk of subconscious mind. Of the significance 
of subconscious mind in these senses I wish to speak briefly 
before bringing this chapter to a close. 

We are all aware of the fact that we know many things with- 
out being able to say just how we know them, and we choose to 
do many things without being able to point out just the motives 
that have influenced our decision. We may have a vague feeling 
of bodily discomfort, and may be very sure that we are not at 
ease, and yet we may be unable to determine to what elements in 
consciousness our elusive discontent may be attributable. After 
a few moments of conversation with a person whom we have met 
for the first time, we turn away with the impression that his 
character is, at bottom, a hard and unsympathetic one, or an 
insincere one, yet we may be quite incapable of justifying our 
impression by referring it to any single clearly discernible facial 
expression or to any objectionable sentence. There is no science 
of physiognomy worthy of the name; yet no one can deny 
that an observant man can gain from the expressions of the 
human face a fair notion of character. Certain marked peculiari- 
ties can, of course, be definitely pointed out. Laughter does not 
suggest a funereal frame of mind ; we know perfectly well what 



506 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

the caricaturist means us to infer when he turns the corners of a 
mouth up or turns them down ; but our information as to what 
is revealed by facial expression goes much beyond this, and we 
may confidently infer calm strength or a secret sadness where we 
are wholly unable to indicate any definite mark which is made the 
basis of our judgment. 

There is no department of our mental life in which judgments of 
this sort do not play their part. "We are apt to say, in such cases, 
that we feel that this or that is true, or that we know by intuition 
that it is true. Such judgments may be said to have their roots 
in the subconscious, and the immense significance of the subcon- 
scious in the life of man ought to be given due recognition. But 
it must not be forgotten that to recognize the existence of the 
subconscious in this sense is nothing else than to recognize that 
consciousness-contents do not all stand out with equal vividness, 
and that much may be known and may influence our judgments 
without on that account being clearly and analytically known. 

Touching the subconscious in this sense of the word, I beg the 
reader to bear in mind two things : — 

First, let him remember that between the conscious and the 
subconscious there is no clear line. Experiences of the one class 
fade gradually into those of the other ; the difference is one of 
degree and not one of kind. Moreover, there is no reason to 
regard the realm of the subconscious as the abode of a mystery 
which can never be dispelled. Regions which do not lie open to 
the eye of direct introspection may, nevertheless, be explored and 
mapped out with the aid of approved scientific methods. The 
psychologist is constantly occupied in doing work of this kind, and 
it is not inconceivable that the time may come when his informa- 
tion touching the dimmest and vaguest of the elements which enter 
into our mental life may be reasonably clear and satisfactory. 

In the second place, let it not be forgotten that we have no 
warrant for assuming that "intuitions" are infallible, or even 
tliat they are of necessity a safer guide than the deliverances of 
conscious reflection. For example, most of the persons with 
whom we come in contact have little interest in Ethics as a 
science, but they have very definite opinions upon the subject of 
what is right and what is wrong in individual cases. If we ask 
why an action is riglit or how it is known that an action is right, 
we receive from them no intelligible answer. They feel that it 



Subconscious Mind 507 

is right, and that is sufficient. Now, I have no desire to under- 
rate the importance of the unsystematic and sometimes erratic 
ethical training to which we are all subjected from the cradle, nor 
would I maintain that any course in Ethics could take its place. 
But it is just to point out that the ethical " intuitions " of the 
individual may reflect the prejudices of an age, of a nation, of a 
community, or of a social class, and may seem sadly in need of 
revision to one capable of a wider vision. 

Science is not infallible, and the attempt to think clearly may 
result in one's taking the wrong path ; but to heap obloquy upon 
science and clear thought and to turn by preference to the sub- 
conscious as the ground of one's judgments, is to close deliberately 
the windows which admit the light of day, and to prepare for 
oneself that darkness in which the ghosts of superstition may 
be expected to appear. 

I may be excused for uttering a somewhat similar note of 
warning touching our attitude toward the subconscious in the 
sense of other-consciousness. That more than one consciousness 
may be referred to the one organism we may accept as fact. 
The contents of such consciousnesses and their relations to 
each other are legitimate matter for scientific investigation. 
There is no field of science, however, which calls for more 
patience and more caution in him who would cultivate it 
successfully. This is a soil upon which every superstition has 
flourished in the past, and it appears ever ready to give birth to 
hasty generalizations, far-reaching inferences, and bold flights of 
the poetic imagination. To do good work in this field one needs 
to have in one's composition a grain of scepticism, and one needs 
also to possess a nice sense of what constitutes scientific evidence. 
Unhappily, it appears that this field offers irresistible attractions 
to the man who revels in the mystery of the subconscious, who 
thrills in the presence of spiritualistic mediums, who looks for 
short cuts to the solution of great problems, who loves the poetry 
of science rather than the dry facts which constitute the body of 
exact knowledge. Of the subconscious in the sense under dis- 
cussion we have so little knowledge that is worthy to be called 
scientific, that the prudent man will regard with no other feeling 
than curiosity the airy edifices which uncritical minds have 
optimistically founded upon it and whose mushroom growth may 
safely be accepted as a mark of their unsubstantial character. 



CHAPTER XXXI 
MENTAL PHENOMENA AND THE CAUSAL NEXUS 

In the doctrine of mind and world which has been set forth in 
the preceding chapters, mental phenomena have not been placed 
in the one series of causes and effects with the occurrences which 
belong to the physical world. 

In common life we use the words " cause " and " effect " loosely, 
and there is no reason why we should affect a rigorous exactness 
which is not called for by the exigencies of the situation, and 
which savors of pedantry. But one who has seen the force of the 
considerations urged by the parallelist, and has come to appreci- 
ate the distinction between the subjective order of experience and 
the objective, cannot be inclined to regard sensations or ideas as 
the effects of physical causes or as the causes of physical effects, 
when the words " cause " and " effect " are used in their strict and 
proper significance. If the physical world is a perfect mechanism, 
there is no physical occurrence which cannot theoretically be 
completely accounted for by a reference to physical causes, and 
there is none whose effect can be other than a physical occur- 
rence. Cause and effect are seen to be a name for antecedent 
and consequent in the series of changes that constitute the life 
history of the mechanism of nature. In this series of changes 
mental phenomena have no place ; they belong to a different 
order — they are not antecedent or consequent^ but have their place 
on a parallel line. Their abstraction does not leave the order of 
causes and effects incomplete. 

Again. Mental phenomena have not been shown to belong to 
a single orderly world of their own, in which tlie appearance of a 
sensation or of an idea could be accounted for somewhat as the 
fall of a raindrop can be accounted for in the physical world. It 
is true, we sometimes point to tlie Laws of the association of ideas ; 
and speak as thougli the idea which " introduces " another were a 
cause of the appearance of the latter. The analogy, however, 

608 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 509 

between such antecedence and succession and the order of 
physical causes and effects is an extremely remote one. 

In the mechanical order of nature it is inconceivable that a 
given cause should produce any other than one single effect, and 
the precise nature of this effect may (theoretically) be calculated 
by any one who is acquainted with the cause. On the other hand, 
any sort of idea may suggest any other, if the two happen to be 
connected — a sight may suggest a sound, another sight, or the 
idea of a movement. We can trace no fixed proportion between 
the antecedent idea and its successor ; nothing that in the least 
corresponds to the nice adjustment of causes and effects in the 
external world. Moreover, even were we inclined to regard such 
a relation of ideas as a causal connection, we should be compelled 
to admit that the rise of a sensation could not be accounted for 
by a reference to any antecedent mental fact. Finally, the realm 
of minds appears to be broken up into a great number of relatively 
independent principalities, which transact their business without 
much reference to each other. An idea in a mind may suggest 
another idea in the same mind, but the chain soon comes to an 
end, and we cannot follow it through a series of minds into an 
indefinite past. But it is conceivable that one who knew enough 
should trace the antecedents of the falling drop along the series 
of physical causes to the cosmic mist from which in the fulness 
of time our universe was precipitated. 

In the seventeenth century a man of genius made the bold 
attempt to treat mental phenomena after the fashion of physical 
phenomena. Spinoza accepted a physical world complete in itself 
and wholly cut off from any interference from the world of mind. 
But he also assumed a mental world equally complete in itself, 
and unaffected by any of the changes taking place in the world 
of material things. He conceived all nature to be animated, and 
held that each corporeal thing has corresponding to it a mental 
thing, which may be called its idea. He would have us believe 
that all these mental things or ideas are interrelated as are the 
physical things to which they correspond; that they constitute a 
system of essentially the same character ; and that, just as hap- 
penings in the material world are completely accounted for by 
a reference to their physical causes, so we may account completely 
for all happenings in the world of ideas by a reference to mental 
causes, which are other ideas. This is a parallelism which does 



510 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

not content itself with a somewhat parsimonious distribution of 
halos, but conjures up and places beside the material world a 
second world coextensive with it, as complex, as self-sufficing, as 
well able to get along entirely by itself. The boldness of the 
speculation compels our admiration. 

Our conviction, however, it cannot compel. When we open 
our eyes and ask ourselves what are actually the facts in the 
case, we realize that our philosopher has given free rein to his 
imagination. We have seen, in discussing the distribution of 
minds, that our evidence for the existence of mind gradually fades 
out. That human bodies reveal mind, it does not occur to us to 
doubt at all. That certain other bodies, widely different from 
human bodies, yet bearing some analogy to them, reveal mind, 
we think possible and perhaps probable. But we must admit 
that we have no evidence that consciousness or anything like 
consciousness accompanies the fall of a raindrop, the rending 
of a rock through the influence of frost, the chemical changes 
which reveal themselves to us under the form of combustion, the 
electric discharge that spreads devastation in the storm. 

The geologist informs us that there was a time when the 
occurrences on this planet were of no other character. We now 
find it a little world in which one of the most striking facts is the 
distribution of minds. The evolutionary philosopher, if he ven- 
ture to touch upon the matter at all, seems forced to conclude, 
with Mr. Spencer, that, at some point in the world's history, con- 
sciousness has become "nascent." And this, the appearance of a 
new sort of being, has been followed by what may be called a 
whole series of beginnings. With the gradual development of 
organisms and the increasing complexity of nervous structures, 
there have come into existence new classes of sensations, colors, 
sounds, tastes, odors. Such as these did not exist and could not 
exist so long as the life of the world was of a low order. 

We need not, however, go back to a remote and little known 
past in order to find ourselves confronted with this problem of 
beginnings. Spinoza's notion that all the mental phenomena that 
exist form one directly interrelated system is, as I have above indi- 
cated, by no means borne out b}' the facts. If the coming into 
existence of a consciousness at some distant past time is a problem, 
the coming into existence of a new consciousness at tlie present 
moment is equally a problem. I cannot say that consciousness 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 511 

began once for all with the first rudimentary sensation of a 
creature which has long since disappeared. That sensation has 
not existed continuously since, passing from consciousness to 
consciousness and rendering it unnecessary to assume anywhere 
an origination. Nor may we regard that sensation as related to 
later sensations as a physical cause is related to its effect. They 
cannot be derived from it in any intelligible sense of the word. 
If, then, it is worth while to dwell upon the coming into being of 
consciousness at some period of the world's history, it is worth 
while to reflect upon the coming into being of the consciousnesses 
which appear to be introducing themselves upon the stage all about 
us at the present day. 

Moreover, we must not forget that a consciousness is a complex 
thing and does not come into being in an instant. It is composed 
of phenomena which succeed each other in time, and it is born, so 
to speak, bit by bit. New phenomena appear in it from moment 
to moment. At times the consciousness seems to be suppressed, 
that is to say, there is, as in sound sleep, a time which we may 
regard as unfilled by phenomena of any sort ; and then the thread 
is taken up again with the appearance of new phenomena. If we 
may anywhere ask for an explanation of origins, must we not ask 
for it all along the line — at the rise of every consciousness, at the 
appearance in each consciousness of every new phenomenon what- 
ever ? And if we may neither account for mental phenomena as 
the results of physical causes, nor account for them as the results 
of mental causes, in what sort of a world are we ? Are we not 
forced to reject the Lucretian maxim that nothing is born from 
nothing, and into nothing nothing can return? The psychologist, 
then, seems to be busied with existences which appear and dis- 
appear causelessly, and we may deride him for wasting his time 
upon that which cannot be the object of a science. 

The notion that any occurrence whatever must be left at loose 
ends and denied a place in the orderly system of nature cannot 
but seem shocking to the man of scientific mind. It is scarcely 
too much to say that even the plain man, when he reflects upon 
the matter, must find something absurd in the doctrine that men- 
tal phenomena are existences of so irresponsible a nature that their 
appearances and disappearances are to be regarded as inexplicable. 
Common experience appears to testify to a certain orderliness in 
the world of mind, as well as in the world of matter. The nature 



512 Other Minds y and the Realm of Minds 

of the mental phenomena that will make their appearance when 
the schoolmaster's rod has been applied to a boy's body can be 
predicted. 

The simplest and the most natural hypothesis to account for 
such facts as these seems, at first sight, to be that of the plain 
man, who can see no objection to regarding thoughts and things 
as having their place in the one causal nexus. We have seen ^ 
that so eminent a scientist as Mr. Huxley can accept this scheme 
with some slight modification, and can hold that consciousness is 
related to the mechanism of the body as a collateral product of its 
working. He who can conceive of consciousness in this way does 
seem to have found a place for consciousness in nature, and need 
not regard the appearance of a given sensation or idea at a given 
time as inexplicable. Moreover, he need not be disturbed by the 
fact that mental phenomena appear sporadically, and that the 
mental world as a whole is, so to speak, a thing of gaps and 
patches. He may believe that consciousness is produced or 
destroyed as the conditions for its production or destruction are 
forthcoming. 

Nevertheless, the hypothesis seems rather a crude one to the 
man who realizes the gulf that lies between physical phenomena 
and mental. The depth of the abyss is sometimes recognized even 
by the man whose eager desire to fit all phenomena whatever into 
the one evolutionary scheme leads him to close his eyes to it at 
certain critical points in his system. Thus Mr. Spencer, when he 
is treating of the distinction between physical phenomena and 
mental phenomena, writes as follows : — 

" Throughout the foregoing chapters nervous phenomena have 
been formulated in terms of Matter and Motion. If from time to 
time the phrases used have been tacitly referred to another aspect 
of nervous phenomena, the tacit references have formed no parts 
of the propositions set down; but have been due to lack of fit 
words — words free from unfit associations. As already said, the 
nervous system can be known only as a structure that undergoes 
and initiates either visible changes, or changes that are repre- 
sentable in terms furnished by the visible world. And thus far 
we have limited ourselves to generalizing the phenomena which it 
thus presents to us objectively. 

"Now, however, we turn to a totally distinct aspect of our 
1 Chapter XVIII. 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 513 

subject. There lies before us a class of facts absolutely without 
any perceptible or conceivable community of nature with the facts 
that have occupied us. The truths here to be set down are truths 
of which the very elements are unknown to physical science. Ob- 
jective observation and analysis fail us ; and subjective observation 
and analysis must supplement them. 

" In other words, we have to treat of nervous phenomena as 
phenomena of consciousness. The changes which, regarded as 
modes of the Non-Ego^ have been expressed in terms of motion, 
have now, regarded as modes of the Ego^ to be expressed in terms 
of feeling. Having contemplated these changes on their outsides, 
we have to contemplate them from their insides. " ^ 

I shall not here comment upon Mr. Spencer's suggestion that 
it is the one series of changes that is to be expressed, now in 
terms of motion, and now in terms of feeling ; nor upon his use 
of the words "inside" and "outside." These are the usual con- 
fusions of the parallelist who has not yet freed himself from the 
trammels of materialistic thinking. I content myself with remark- 
ing that in the above extract he regards mental phenomena as 
absolutely without any perceptible or conceivable community of 
nature with physical facts, as lying wholly outside the sphere 
of physical science. They cannot, then, be related to physical 
facts precisely as these latter are related to each other, and one 
may well question whether they can be the causes or effects of 
motions in matter. Mr. Huxley's explanation of the rise of a 
sensation seems, hence, to be at least a dubious one. 

But does it not remain for Mr. Spencer to face the question of 
the coming into being of mental phenomena? He recognizes the 
fact that it is not every physical change, nor even every nervous 
change,^ that has an " inside." The " insides " of physical changes 
only come into being at this or that point in the world's history. 
How account for such a beginning to be? Must it not be ac- 
counted for, if the continuity of the world-process is to be kept 
unbroken? Mr. Spencer accounts for it by quietly obliterating 
the distinction which he has drawn : — 

"There cannot be coordination of many stimuli without some 

ganglion through which they are all brought into relation. In 

the process of bringing them into relation, this ganglion must be 

subject to the influence of each — must undergo many changes. 

1 " Principles of Psychology," Part I, Chapter VI, § 41. 2 j^^-^,^ § 43. 

2l 



514 Other Minds, and the Beabn of Minds 

And the quick succession of changes in a ganglion, implying as it 
does perpetual experiences of differences and likenesses, consti- 
tutes the raw material of consciousness. The implication is that 
as fast as Instinct is developed, some kind of consciousness 
becomes nascent/"^ 

We see thus, that, although there is absolutely no perceptible 
community of nature between physical facts and mental facts, a 
succession of physical changes, if rapid enough, may constitute 
the raw material of consciousness. No wonder Mr. Spencer finds 
himself "passing without break from the phenomena of bodily 
life to the phenomena of mental life."^ 

Such a jump from the physical to the mental Professor Clifford 
cannot make, but he feels no less strongly than Mr. Spencer the 
necessity of fitting mental phenomena into a general evolutionary 
scheme. Having observed that the complexity of consciousness 
is paralleled by complexity of action in the brain, and having 
inferred a correspondence extending even to the elements, that is 
to say, having inferred that each simple feeling corresponds to 
a special comparatively simple change of nerve matter, he develops 
his doctrine as follows :^ — 

" The conclusion that elementary feeling coexists with ele- 
mentary brain-motion in the same way as consciousness coexists 
with complex brain-motion involves more important consequences 
than might at first sight appear. We have regarded conscious- 
ness as a complex of feelings, and explained the fact that the 
complex is conscious as depending on the mode of complication. 
But does not the elementary feeling itself imply a consciousness 
in which alone it can exist, and of which it is a modification? 
Can a feeling exist of itself, without forming part of a conscious- 
ness? I shall say no to the first question, and yes to the second, 
and it seems to me that these answers are required by the doctrine 
of evolution. For if that doctrine be true, we shall have along 
the line of the human pedigree a series of imperceptible steps 
connecting inorganic matter with ourselves. To the later mem- 
bers of that series we must undoubtedly ascribe consciousness, 
although it must, of course, have been simpler than our own. 
But where are we to stop ? In the case of organisms of a certain 

1 Op. cit., Part IV, Chapter V, § 195. « Ibid., Part III, Chapter I, § 131. 

*"0n the Nature of Things-in-themselves," Lectures aiid Essays, London, 
1879. 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 515 

complexity, consciousness is inferred. As we go back along the 
line, the complexity of the organism and of its nerve-action in- 
sensibly diminishes ; and for the first part of our course we see 
reason to think that the complexity of consciousness insensibly 
diminishes also. But if we make a jump, say to the tunicate 
mollusks, we see no reason there to infer the existence of con- 
sciousness at all. Yet not only is it impossible to point out a 
place where any sudden break takes place, but it is contrary to all 
the natural training of our minds to suppose a breach of continuity 
so great. All this imagined line of organisms is a series of objects 
in my consciousness ; they form an insensible gradation, and yet 
there is a certain unknown point at which I am at liberty to infer 
facts out of my consciousness corresponding to them ! There is 
only one way out of the difficulty, and to that we are driven. 
Consciousness is a complex of ejective facts, — of elementary feel- 
ings, or rather of those remoter elements which cannot even be 
felt, but of which the simplest feeling is built up. Such ele- 
mentary ejective facts go along with the action of every organism, 
however simple ; but it is only when the material organism has 
reached a certain complexity of nervous structure (not now to be 
specified) that the complex of ejective facts reaches that mode 
of complication which is called Consciousness. But as the line of 
ascent is unbroken, and must end at last in inorganic matter, we 
have no choice but to admit that every motion of matter is simul- 
taneous with some ejective fact or event which might be part of a 
consciousness. From this follow two important corollaries. 

"1. A feeling can exist by itself, without forming part of a 
consciousness. It does not depend for its existence on the con- 
sciousness of which it may form a part. Hence a feeling (or an 
eject-element) is Ding-an-sich, an absolute, whose existence is not 
relative to anything else. Sentitur is all that can be said. 

"2. These eject-elements, which correspond to motions of 
matter, are connected together in their sequence and coexistence 
by counterparts of the physical laws of matter. For otherwise the 
correspondence could not be kept up. 

"That element of which, as we have seen, even the simplest 
feeling is a complex, I shall call Mind-stuff. A moving molecule 
of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness ; but 
it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff. When molecules are so 
combined together as to form the film on the under side of a jelly- 



616 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

fish, the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them are so 
combined as to form the faint beginnings of Sentience. When 
the molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous 
system of a vertebrate, the corresponding elements of mind-stuff 
are so combined as to form some kind of consciousness ; that is to 
say, changes in the complex which take place at the same time 
get so linked together that the repetition of one implies the repe- 
tition of the other. When matter takes the complex form of a 
living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form 
of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition." 

This is the famous Mind-stuff theory. How deeply Clifford's 
thought has been influenced by Spinoza is everywhere manifest. 
The theory rests upon three very bold assumptions — indeed, it is 
not too much to say that it consists of three very bold assumptions. 

The first assumption is the existence of mind-stuff. The only 
argument we have for the existence of ejects proves that they 
exist somewhere in the world, i.e. that they are revealed by 
certain organisms. Clifford assumes that they exist everywhere. 
For this we have not a shred of evidence. 

The second assumption is that mental phenomena are so in- 
terrelated that there obtain in the realm of mind laws which 
are the counterpart of the physical laws of matter. This Spino- 
zistic notion is, as I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, flatly 
contradicted by what little we know of minds. 

The third assumption is that all the classes of sensations and 
ideas of which we are conscious, colors, tastes, sounds, etc., are 
composed of elements Avhich are not of these classes at all, but 
something more rudimentary, something that " cannot even be felt." 

Before the publication of the essay from which I have quoted 
above, Mr. Spencer had printed in his "Principles of Psychology" 
an argument to prove that all classes of sensations and emotions 
are built out of a common unit, a primordial element of conscious- 
ness, which he identifies with a "nervous shock." ^ Are not 
musical sounds due to a series of rapid vibrations each of which 
affects the organ of hearing ? Is not the note as heard seemingly 
continuous? Must not the seemingly continuous note really be 
composed of a vast number of distinct consciousness-elements 
each of which is due to a single blow upon the organ of sense ? 
This doctrine of Mr. Spencer has been much criticised by the 
1 " Principles of Psychology," Part II, Chapter I, § CO. 



Mental Fhenomena and the Causal Nexus 517 

psychologist, and I shall do no more than remind the reader that 
it carries us back at once to the minimum visihile hypothesis 
discussed in the last chapter. To discover what is actually in a 
man's consciousness we must not content ourselves with counting 
the number of vibrations in some medium outside of him. To 
arrive at the elements of which any complex state of consciousness 
is made up, there is but one method of procedure — psychological 
analysis ; and psychological analysis furnishes no evidence what- 
ever that the mental phenomena with which we are familiar are 
made up of any such material as has been suggested either by 
Mr. Spencer or by Professor Clifford. For the third assumption 
there is no more justification than there is for the other two. 

The mind-stuff theory is, then, a castle in the air. What in- 
duced a man of science to erect so imposing a structure upon so 
unsubstantial a foundation? Clifford tells us himself: it is "con- 
trary to all the natural training of our mind " to suppose a breach 
of continuity. In other words, it is repugnant to our minds to 
suppose that mental phenomena may appear upon the scene with- 
out antecedents. To avoid such a conclusion we may make all 
sorts of assumptions for which we can furnish no warrant in ob- 
served fact. 

The attitude of the man of science, as exemplified by the 
writers who have been mentioned above, is one with which it is 
not hard to feel sympathy. The man of science has learned to 
regard the material world as a system in which there is constant 
transformation, but nothing that may be regarded as creation. 
In an earlier age, this attitude toward the material world expressed 
itself in the statement that through all the changes that take place 
in the world the quantity of matter and motion remains the same. 
To-day the doctrine of the eternity of mass and the conservation 
of energy has taken its place, and better formulates the conclu- 
sion to which physical facts seem to point. It recognizes a certain 
equivalence among physical phenomena, and it maintains that no 
•change whatever can take place in the system of physical things 
which is not preceded by, and followed by, conditions which a 
knowledge of the system would show to be the equivalent of the 
change in question. In other words, it explains every change by 
referring it to its adequate cause, which, after all, means only 
that it explains every change by showing that it is an exemplifica- 
tion of the laws of the system. 



518 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

Now the coming into being of a group of mental phenomena 
is a change — if not a change in the material world, still a change 
in the universe as a whole. Must we not account for this as ex- 
perience has shown us that we must account for physical phenom- 
ena ? That is to say, must we not follow " the natural training of 
our mind " ? 

The impulse which is characterized as the natural training of 
our minds should, I suppose, be recognized as having a twofold 
root. First, there is the common experience that mental phenom- 
ena do not seem to be absolutely lawless. They often appear and 
disappear as we would expect them to under the circumstances. 
But this experience does not carry us very far, for we have not a 
very accurate knowledge of mental phenomena. The general ex- 
pectation that in their behavior they will obey some law or laws 
is, in the case of the man of science, greatly reinforced by obser- 
vation that there is a sphere in which the reign of law appears to 
be absolute. In the physical order of causes and effects every 
phenomenon seems to be completely accounted for, and the man 
familiar with this order has an ideal which he is naturally inclined 
to realize everywhere. 

If he has been deeply impressed, as was Clifford, by the con- 
trast of the subjective and the objective orders in experience, he 
may refer mental facts to some independent system of their own. 
To do this he is compelled to assume the existence of a world of 
ideas patterned after the world of things — a prodigious assump- 
tion. If he recognizes that there is no real ground for making 
this assumption, what remains for him save the assumption that 
mental facts can somehow be given a place in the one system 
with physical facts? What more natural, in other words, than 
that he should stretch the doctrine of the conservation of energy ^ 
and make it cover facts mental as well as facts physical ? He 
may then maintain that something may disappear from the phys- 
ical world and its equivalent appear in the world of mind. 

It should not be overlooked that, in either case, it is the ex- 
perience of physical facts and their relations tliat furnishes a basis 
for the inferences drawn concerning mental facts. Of Clifford's 
doctrine I shall say no more ; it is too fanciful to be taken seriously 
by one who has weighed the evidence we have for the existence 

1 In the pages to follow it will be seen that the word *' energy " is used in a very 
broad sense. 



Me7ital Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 519 

of minds and the information we have touching the interrelations 
of mental phenomena. But, as concerns the other doctrine, I 
shall ask : first, Is it a conceivable doctrine ? and, second, If con- 
ceivable, is it a reasonable doctrine for us to adopt ? 

It has been held that the transition from physical to mental 
phenomena is made easier when we make energy^ which is defined 
in terms of work, the fundamental concept from which is derived 
such concepts as matter and cause. We may regard all changes 
as transformations of energy — the change from the purely physi- 
cal to the nervous, and from the nervous (which is still physical 
in the broad sense of the word) to the psychical. If we ask how 
mind and matter are related, we seem to be confronted with a 
serious problem; but when we remember that matter is but a 
manifestation of energy, and that mind is also a manifestation of 
energy, the way is made smooth before us. The various forms of 
energy may be substituted for one another.^ 

But it should never be forgotten that abstract concepts of 
every description gain the only significance which they have from 
the actual individual experiences of the subjective and of the ob- 
jective order upon which they are based. The concepts of energy, 
matter, motion, cause, and all the rest are as empty as the Democri- 
tean void, if we rob them of all reference to the above-mentioned 
experiences and their relations. Nothing is created by a mathe- 
matical formula; something may be summed up by it, i,e, it may 
symbolize something. It is the same with the general notions of 
which we make use in describing our world ; they are convenient 
symbols, but it is absurd to place them above the experiences in 
which they find their justification ; and to be sure that we are 
warranted in using them we must always come back to those 
experiences and see whether they furnish a basis for the super- 
structure that we are attempting to erect upon them. 

Moreover, we must realize that there is a danger in abstract 
expressions. If we will insist, with Fenimore Cooper, in calling 
women " the sex " and water " the element," we may forget that 
some women are unattractive and some water dirty. And if we 
will elect to call physical facts and mental facts different mani- 
festations of energy, we may seem to ourselves to have established 
a bond of community between them, and to have facilitated the 
passage from the one class of experiences to the other. Whether 
1 Compare Ostwald, " Vorlesungen tiber Naturphilosophie," Leipzig, 1902, s. 396. 



520 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

there really is such a bond, and what may be its nature, we cannot 
•discover by a mere distribution of titles. We must come back 
to the individual facts and see how they stand related. 

How, then, must the man Avho wishes to make the doctrine 
of the conservation of energy cover facts mental as well as facts 
physical, conceive of the relation of the objective and the sub- 
jective orders in experience ? 

Let us suppose that, when he speaks of the conservation of 
energy in the physical world, he means merely to recognize the 
equivalence of certain physical phenomena, or groups of physical 
phenomena, mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, etc., and to 
indicate that, among all the changes that take place, there is no 
change that may not be accounted for by a reference to this sys- 
tem of equivalents. That he should extend his doctrine in such 
a way as to make it embrace mental facts means, (1) that he 
should regard the whole body of physical facts as constituting, 
when taken alone, an imperfect system ; and (2) that he should 
regard the lacks of the system as compensated by mental facts. 

Now it should be remarked that the man who holds to the 
existence of such a system of equivalents in the physical world 
is not compelled to maintain that all the classes of phenomena 
that he is dealing with are reducible to the one class, and that 
they are measurable in terms of the same unit. That they may 
be built into a system it is merely necessary that the individual 
phenomena be identifiable, i.e. that they be in each case distin- 
guishable from other phenomena of the same class and from 
phenomena of other classes. If they be thus identifiable, and if 
they be observed to stand in fixed relations to each other, we 
have a system. The recognition of this truth ought to set aside 
an oft-repeated objection to making mental phenomena of any 
sort the equivalent of physical phenomena. It is constantly 
argued that among physical phenomena we may detect a quan- 
titative equivalence, but that the differences in mental phenomena 
are qualitative and not quantitative. It should be observed, how- 
ever, that, even if this were strictly true, it could have no bear- 
ing upon the point under discussion. Mental phenomena are 
distinguishable from each other, they are identifiable ; and if 
it can be proved that, when a particular sensation comes into 
existence, there is a break of a particular sort in the physical 
order, a man may, if he chooses, call tlie sensation the equivalent 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 521 

of what has been found lacking in the physical world. He is 
using the word as he uses it when he speaks of the mechanical 
equivalent of heat or of chemical action. 

Let us suppose, again, that the man who is interested in mak- 
ing the doctrine of the conservation of energy cover mental facts 
does not stop short at chemical, electrical, thermal, and similar 
phenomena, but believes that he is everywhere in the presence of 
a mechanism which is merely veiled by such phenomena. His 
physical world is a world of matter in motion, or, as the student 
of mechanics would express it, a world which may be described 
in terms of mass, length, and time. He, too, has his system of 
equivalents, and it is based upon observation, for the science of 
mechanics is not the product of the poetic imagination, and has 
not been supernaturally revealed to man. It has been built up 
slowly by an observation of the changes in the material world and 
a reflection upon their order. 

How must such a man conceive of the world and the mind 
when he has stretched the doctrine of the conservation of energy ? 
He must hold that the physical world is a mechanism, but a de- 
fective one, and that its defects are compensated by mental phe- 
nomena. In other words, he must hold that sometimes a motion 
may disappear from the physical world, or the mass of a body 
may be slightly diminished, and that the change cannot be ac- 
counted for by a reference to mechanical laws ; and he must 
maintain that, on occasion of a particular disappearance of this 
character, there comes into being a particular mental phenomenon 
or group of mental phenomena. He is not compelled to say that 
matter or motion have " turned into " mind. Such an expression 
gives his opponent too good an opportunity to scoff. He need 
only say that the sensation or other mental fact is the " equiva- 
lent " of something that was not mental. 

Is this doctrine in either of the forms just described a conceiv- 
able one ? It is conceivable, and equally conceivable in both forms. 
So much for the first of the two questions which I raised a few 
pages back. And now for the second : If conceivable, is it a 
reasonable doctrine for us to adopt? 

Perhaps I shall be taxed with inconsistency for passing on so 
quickly to the second question, in view of the answer which I 
have given to the first. Is not the doctrine under discussion a 
form of interactionism — indeed, just the form of interactionism 



522 Other Minds, and the Beahn of Minds 

discussed at tlie close of Chapter XVII ? Was it not there pointed 
out that the interactionist busies himself with the attempt to patch 
up a defective machine with immaterial cogs and couplings, which 
cannot be inserted at the break, because they cannot be given a 
place anywhere in the material world ? Did it not seem to follow 
that the doctrine is in its nature absurd and inconceivable ? 

It is necessary to draw a distinction. The attempt to patch up 
a defective machine with what is immaterial is, indeed, absurd. 
Such a patch cannot be put on, such a joint cannot be inserted, in 
any sense of the words that has a significance. The machine 
remains defective ; there is an unfilled gap. But it is possible 
for one to hold that the external world is a defective machine, and 
that when one discovers a break in it, one may infer the existence 
of mental phenomena, which form no part of the machine, which 
do not fill the gap, which are not anywhere in the external world, 
which belong to a different order. 

Whether any man who realizes clearly how absurd it is to at- 
tempt to patch his machine with such phenomena will break his 
machine here and there, that he may have the pleasure of thus 
patching it, is a different question. If we may judge by what the 
interactionists have actually written, we must conclude that none 
of them would have insisted upon regarding the machine as 
defective were it not for a tincture of materialistic thought — 
for the secret conviction that such patches may be put on. In 
the chapter to which I have above alluded I was concerned with 
showing that the interactionist has always been a veiled materialist. 

That this is true, there can be little doubt. Descartes drops 
his little soul into the pineal gland, where it serves the purpose 
of a cog-wheel that transmits motion. Huxley, who may be called 
half an interactionist, relates the soul to the body as the bell of 
a clock is related to the works, or as the steam whistle is related 
to the locomotive engine. McCosh conceives that mind and body 
came together at some point or surface within the human bodv. 
James speaks of feelings and motions as stewing together in tlie 
same vat. One and all believe that it is possible to patch the 
machine, and it is tliis belief that makes interactionism appear to 
them a desirable doctrine. The word " interaction " does not seem 
to be an empty sound ; it calls up the picture of billiard-balls 
hitting each other, and of predictable resulting motions. 

And what animus has inspired those wlio have scoffed at 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 523 

interactionism ? Nothing else than the recognition that physical 
facts and mental facts belong to different orders, and the con- 
sciousness that it is absurd to try to arrange them in the one 
order. Spinoza could not consent to make one system out of 
things so disparate as thought and extension. " It will," wrote 
Clifford, touching the doctrine of the interactionist, "be found 
excellent practice in the mental operations required by this doc- 
trine, to imagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine 
and three carriages linked with iron couplings, and the hind part 
three other carriages linked with iron couplings ; the bond between 
the two parts being made up out of the sentiments of amity sub- 
sisting between the stoker and the guard." "Try to imagine," 
exclaims another writer, "the idea of a beefsteak binding two 
molecules together." ^ The chasm between the two classes of 
phenomena has not seemed less profound to those who, never- 
theless, do not find it impassable when they are moved by other 
considerations. I have quoted from Mr. Spencer above. Says 
Professor James, "If evolution is to work smoothly, conscious- 
ness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of 
things," 2 which means that evolution must keep to the order with 
which it started, for it cannot pass over the gulf. 

These facts are extremely significant. They indicate plainly 
that the impulse to place mental phenomena in the one causal 
nexus with physical phenomena has its root in an obliteration 
of the distinction between the two. When a man fails to realize 
the distinction between the phenomena of the two orders, and 
slips into a materialization of mental facts, he is ready to become 
an interactionist. He does not become an interactionist because 
the position is a conceivable one, but because it seems to him a 
reasonable one. He has made mental facts more or less incon- 
sistently physical, and he can find no good reason for excluding 
them from the physical order. 

One may hold, then, that it is conceivable that the doctrine of 
the conservation of energy be extended in the sense above in- 
dicated ; and one may maintain, nevertheless, that such an exten- 
sion of it is purely gratuitous, and, hence, unworthy of serious 
consideration. That it is thus gratuitous and unjustifiable I shall 
try to show in what follows. 

1 Mercier, " The Nervous System and the Mind," London, 1888, p. 9. 

2 "Psychology," Vol. I, p. 149. 



524 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

It must be remembered that the man who proposes to stretch the 
doctrine of the conservation of energy must not give to his position 
a spurious air of respectability by a mere trick of phrase. He must 
not obliterate the distinction of the two orders of experience by 
arguing that, as two forms of " energy," material facts and mental 
facts may naturally be built into the one S3'stem. This is beg- 
ging the question at the outset. Upon what, then, shall he ground 
his position? He can furnish but the one argument. There is a 
physical system of things, and there obtains in it an order which 
we call that of cause and effect. No physical phenomenon appears 
to be without its cause. But there exist also mental phenomena, 
and these do not seem to belong to an independent system of their 
own. Are they to be left out in the cold, causeless, unaccounted 
for, unexplained? Perish the thought I let us break the physical 
system in various places and insert them at the gaps thus made. 

Now why is it assumed that it is easier to connect the phe- 
nomena of the subjective order with the physical system of things 
when the latter is assumed to be broken here and there ? Surely 
it must be evident that he who insists upon breaking the system 
is laboring under the delusion that a place must be made for 
mental facts as a place may be made for what is material — they 
must be inserted somewhere. When we realize that such an inser- 
tion is nonsense, we see clearly that the assumption that the 
physical S3'stem is broken is really gratuitous. We have no 
direct evidence that it is broken. We break it ourselves to 
make room for a new link in the chain. The new link cannot 
conceivably be inserted. Then what possible purpose can it serve 
to break the chain ? 

The truth is that an insistence upon the assumption that the 
physical order of things is not a complete and independent system 
invariably rests upon an unwillingness to regard tl>e distinction 
between the subjective order and the objective order as a unique 
fact. We have seen ^ that even the parallelist is apt to fall back 
upon a material analogy, and to take it with literal seriousness, 
when he proposes to explain how it is that mental phenomena 
and physical are concomitant. To explain such a fact means 
to assimilate it to other facts, to show that it is not unique, to 
materialize it. And he who will extend the doctrine of the conser- 
vation of energy to mental facts explains the coming into being of 

1 Chapter XX. 



1 



Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus 525 

mental phenomena by pointing out that they are not fundamentally 
different from physical phenomena, that the distinction between 
the subjective and the objective orders of experience may be set 
aside, and that all phenomena may be treated as though they 
belonged to the one order — which they do not. 

Shall we, then, admit that the coming into being of mental 
phenomena is causeless ? Certainly ; but let us not be misled 
by an ambiguity. By the use of such an expression we should 
only mean that mental phenomena have no place in the physical 
system of things, and that they do not hold in a system of their 
own a place analogous to that held in the physical system by 
physical phenomena. We need not mean that mental phenomena 
are left at loose ends, unaccounted for, unexplained in any intelli- 
gible sense of the word. If the doctrine which I have urged in 
this volume be the true one, there is no mental phenomenon which 
may not be accounted for in the only way in vs^hich we have a right 
to account for mental phenomena. 

It may be given its place and time of existence in the sense 
discussed in Chapter XXIV ; it may be ordered by a reference 
to the physical system, if it cannot form part of it. To ask for 
an explanation of the fact that there are mental phenomena at all, 
is to ask a foolish question. To ask v^hy this or that mental 
phenomenon comes into existence at a given moment may be a 
sensible question, but it is only a sensible question when the man 
who proposes it looks for his answer in the field of our general 
knowledge of mental phenomena and their relations to the physi- 
cal world. The answer must consist in showing that experience 
has revealed that this is the particular case of concomitance that 
we have reason to expect under the circumstances. 

Thus we see that the doctrine of the conservation of energy 
has really nothing to do with mental phenomena. What shall we 
say of the doctrine of evolution as applied to mind? Evidently 
we may not hold that mind is evolved from matter as a higher 
organism is evolved from a lower. We have seen that we must 
not place mind in the one chain of causes and effects with things 
physical. It is this truth that is emphasized in the statement 
that, "if evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some 
shape must have been present at the very origin of things." But 
is there any hope of making evolution work smoothly if we refuse 
to admit into our scheme any save mental phenomena ? May we 



526 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

fix our attention upon mental phenomena alone and still speak 
of an evolution of mind? We can do this only if we will follow 
Spinoza in the assumption of a complete system of mental phe- 
nomena analogous to the system of physical phenomena which we 
call the external world. The existence of such a system is, how- 
ever, as I have said above, flatly contradicted by what we know 
of minds. 

Must we, then, abandon the convenient expression "mental 
evolution " ? Not at all. We must understand it and avoid 
being misled by it. There is no reason why we should not use 
the phrase to mark the fact that minds increasingly complex have 
been revealed by the organisms which have successively made 
their appearance in the course of the physical evolution of things ; 
and there is no reason why we should not, upon a knowledge of 
what has been, base a reasonable expectation of what will be in the 
time that is to come. 



CHAPTER XXXII 
MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY 

To the doctrine set forth in the preceding chapter many per- 
sons will be prompt to urge objections. " What ! " I hear them 
exclaim, " are we to deny to mental phenomena a place in the one 
causal nexus with material phenomena ? Then let us admit at 
once that no mind can act upon matter and bring about changes 
in it, and let us also accept the unpalatable corollary that no mind 
can act upon another mind. Let us write the mind down an epi- 
phenomenon, a shadow, an otiose thing, seeing all its own mis- 
chance, but unable to lift a finger to determine is own fate. 
Let us call man a physical automaton with parallel psychical 
states, and let us be penetrated with the conviction that he walks 
in a vain show. Perish all respect for that passive halo, that 
thing of functions merely decorative, the human mind, of which 
men have spoken in the past with such misplaced respect." 

I must begin my answer to all such objections with the 
remark that, if the doctrine set forth in the preceding chapter 
really did imply the repudiation of all those experiences com- 
monly described as instances of the action of mind upon matter 
and of mind upon mind, that doctrine would undoubtedly have 
to be abandoned. It is matter of common experience that we 
desire, will, and attain ends. The architect conceives a plan, 
and puts it on paper; the mason and the carpenter set matter in 
motion, and build a house ; we see the house, we are pleased with 
it, and we buy it. The architect certainly framed his plan with 
an end in view ; the artisans did not labor without a purpose ; 
we take the house that we may live in it. 

In answer to the question ; Why did builder build, and 
buyer buy ? we reply unhesitatingly : The one worked to get his 
wage, and the other paid over his money to have a home of his 
own. Our answer takes no account of the efficient causes of the 
actions in question ; it concerns itself with the indication of ends^ 

527 



528 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

and it contents the questioner, who regards human actions as 
satisfactorily exphiined when he is able to look upon them as 
means to the attainment of given ends. 

He is little interested in the chain of physical causes and effects 
as such. Those links which lie in the human brain are unknown 
to him, and even were he much better informed than he is, it is 
inconceivable that this chain should in itself absorb his attention. 
His world is not merely a world of matter ; it is also a world of 
mind, and he is intensely interested in thoughts, feelings, the 
satisfaction of impulses. External things gain for him a peculiar 
value and significance when they are found to be related in 
certain ways to things mental. He shows his good sense in 
thinking of and speaking of his world in such a way as to em- 
phasize those relations among his experiences which seem to him 
to be of the highest importance. He does so unconsciously and 
instinctively, and is apt to forget that it is possible to regard 
things from another point of view as well. 

I have said that it is a matter of common experience that men 
form plans and attain ends. He who utterly repudiates this 
common experience, and denies that men form plans and attain 
ends, will justly be regarded by his neighbors as little better than 
a fool. But it must not be forgotten that it is one thing to 
repudiate common experience, and quite another to seek to 
arrive at a clearer comprehension of what it signifies, by the aid 
of a careful analysis. 

For example, we are told that our neighbor arose at five 
o'clock in the morning, because the train was to leave at six ; 
that he took his luncheon with him, because he would be unable 
to procure anything to eat on the journey ; that he left directions 
with the servants, because the plumber would put in an appear- 
ance before his return. We understand quite well what we are 
meant to understand by such statements, and we know that they 
serve to express truth. If an ofificious bystander insists that 
they cannot be true, on the ground that an occurrence not yet 
existent cannot be the cause of a present occurrence, or on the 
ground that the mental cannot interact with the physical, we 
decide that his reading has been too much for his good sense. 

The statements express truth ; it is silly to deny them, and it 
is silly to block the wheels of human intercourse by trying to 
express the same truth in some strange and unaccustomed way. 



Mechanism and Teleology 529 

One will only be misunderstood for one's pains, and in all proba- 
bility one will deceive oneself as well as others. Let the common 
expressions stand. They have long served their purpose, and our 
emotional as well as our intellectual adjustments to them are what 
they ought to be. 

But this does not mean that the thinker ought not to strive to 
make very clear to himself the exact significance of such words as 
*' purpose " and " end." If there is danger of falling into misappre- 
hensions, if words appear to be used in more than one sense, if the 
truth that is conveyed by such expressions as those commented 
upon above is found to be a vaguely apprehended truth, it is surely 
desirable to subject the whole matter to careful criticism. The 
plain man undoubtedly has experiences in which the external 
world is presented to him ; he knows more or less vaguely what 
he means by material things. When the metaphysician endeavors 
to give a more exact account of what is meant by the external 
world, he does not repudiate these experiences, and declare the 
plain man's notions of the external world to be wholly untrust- 
worthy. He recognizes the fact that it is just these experiences 
which must furnish the starting-point for his own investigations, 
and he sees that it is his duty not to deny, but to comprehend. It 
is within his province to point out definitely what we mean by space 
and time ; it is not within his province to call in question the 
assertion of a competent astronomer that a given star crossed the 
meridian at a given moment. In the same way, he must accept 
the world of purposes and ends revealed in common experience, 
but he must realize that such an acceptance does not absolve him 
from the duty of striving to comprehend the significance of what 
he thus accepts, and of assigning to purposes and ends their rea- 
sonable place in the world-order as a whole. 

That it is not enough to dismiss the subject with an appeal to 
common experience must be evident to any one who has the least 
acquaintance with the history of speculative thought. How one 
is to conceive of the final cause or end of action, and of its rela- 
tion to the efficient cause, has been a problem to the reflective 
mind for many centuries. 

Is the end a cause at all ? Undoubtedly we sometimes speak 
as though it were. Do we not say that our neighbor rose at five 
o'clock because \iQ was going to leave on the six-o'clock train? 
This sounds Aristotelian. On the other hand, we sometimes 



530 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

describe the same occurrence by saying that our neighbor rose 
early, because he had the intention of leaving on an early train — 
a turn of phrase which Spinoza would have regarded as prefer- 
able to the former. " What is called the final cause," he writes, 
" is nothing but human impulse itself, in so far as it is considered 
as the efficient or determining cause of something. For example, 
when we say that the living in it was the final cause of this or that 
house, we mean only that a man, because he formed a conception 
of the pleasures of domestic life, had an impulse to build a house. 
Hence, the living in it, in so far as it is considered as final cause, 
is nothing but this particular impulse, which, in truth, is the effi- 
cient cause ; and it is regarded as the first, because men are com- 
monly ignorant of the causes of their impulses." ^ "I will add," 
he complains in another place,^ " that this doctrine of final causes 
simply turns nature upside down. It regards as effect what is 
really cause, and vice versa.'''' 

This is a protest against regarding that which is not yet as a 
cause of that which is. Can the non-existent be a cause ? Can it 
produce anything ? The living in a house comes after the con- 
struction of the house ; how can it be a cause of the construction ? 
The real cause, says Spinoza, is not the living in the house ; that 
is effect, not cause. The cause is the idea^ the human impulse, 
which works itself out in the production of the end. 

In criticism of this criticism I must dwell upon two points. 
First, it should be remarked that the objection — one which has 
been made often enough since — is really an objection to the use 
of a word. If we decide that the word " cause " cannot properly be 
used except in speaking of efficient causes, then it goes without 
saying that final causes are not causes at all. Thus Spinoza insists 
that the final cause or end is not cause, but effect — whicli clearly 
indicates that he thinks the word " cause " should be used in only 
the one sense. He is certainly right in holding that that which 
is spoken of as end or final cause may also be regarded as an 
effect in the chain of efficient causes and effects. The living in a 
house is not a fact which has burst into being from nowhere ; it 
has its antecedents. 

But it seems somewhat dogmatic to insist that a word shall have 
but one meaning when long usage has granted it two meanings. 
From Aristotle down, men had distinguished between the effi- 
1" Ethics," IV, Preface. ^Ibid.y I, Appendix. 



Mechanism and Teleology 531 

cient cause and the final, and had often done so with some degree 
of clearness. The distinction between the two was not always 
well grasped, but at least the distinction was recognized. It is 
not out of place to deplore the fact that one and the same word 
should be used to express two different ideas, nor is it out of 
place to point out that men are actually betrayed now and then 
into confusing the two ideas by the fact that the one word is 
used to express both. But to insist that one of the ideas shall 
be thrown away, or, at least, left without a word to express it, 
seems, as I have said, dogmatic, and it is certainly unreasonable. 

However, Spinoza's protest is, to the reflective mind, of no 
little service in emphasizing the fact that final causes and efficient 
must not be confounded. When the distinction between them 
is grasped with sufficient clearness, it is seen that a number of 
apparent problems quite lose their problematic character. For 
example, the objection that the end cannot be a cause, since it 
has not yet come into existence, and the non-existent cannot be 
the cause of anything, falls away of itself. Of course, that which 
has not existed and does not exist cannot be the efficient cause of 
anything ; but there is nothing in the world to prevent it from 
being the final cause, the end. The end is that which is to be ; 
it would be absurd to make it that which has been. The whole 
force of the objection lies in the tacit assumption that a cause is a 
cause, and that, as such, it must antecede its effect. 

The same assumption lends its force to the objection that the 
doctrine of final causes turns nature upside down, putting cause 
in the place of effect and vice versa. From the point of view of 
efficient causes, my getting up at five o'clock may be regarded as 
a cause of my departure in the train at six ; but there is no reason 
in the world why, from the point of view of final causes, my 
leaving at six should not be regarded as the cause of my getting 
up at five. Nor should we wonder at the fact that the same 
occurrence should have both efficient cause and final cause. It 
would be remarkable were a day found to have two beginnings ; 
it is in no wise remarkable that it is found to have a beginning 
and an end. 

In the second place, I must call attention to the fact that, in 
the first extract given above, Spinoza was not a good Spinozist. 
He sets a man's conception of the pleasures of domestic life in the 
one causal nexus with the building of a house. In other words, 



532 Other Minds, and the Bealm of Minds 

he puts facts mental and facts physical into the relation of 
efficient cause and effect, which is such heresy in a parallelist 
that we must assume that our author nodded in writing the 
passage. 

However, I must not be tempted to delay over what has been 
said on the subject of final causes by the great men of the past. 
The question I have set out to discuss is : Shall the doctrine of 
mind and matter advocated in the preceding chapters be set down 
as repudiating final causes ? as reducing the human mind to a 
shadow whose desires and purposes are without significance ? as 
turning nature into brute mechanism — a thing to be feared, but 
in no wise to be loved ? In treating this question I shall set 
forth the doctrine of final causes in typical modern form ; and I 
shall then try to make clear that, when certain metaphysical mis- 
conceptions are set aside, — misconceptions the setting aside of 
which need not cause the least concern to the plain man, — the 
doctrine of final causes may be frankly accepted, as embodying 
truth, by one who approves the reasonings contained in this 
volume. 

For the typical statement which I wish to set before the 
reader I turn to M. Paul Janet's admirable volume,^ the clearest, 
the fullest, and in many respects the most satisfactory discussion 
of the subject that we have. 

" The expression ' final cause ' (causa jinalis) was," writes M. 
Janet, " introduced into philosophic speech by the scholastics. It 
signifies the end (finis) for which one acts, or toward which one 
tends, and which, hence, may be regarded as a cause of action or 
of movement. Aristotle explains it thus : ' Another sort of 
cause,' he says, ' is the end, that is to say, that in vieiv of which 
(to ov eveKa) the action is performed ; for example, in this sense, 
health is the cause of taking a walk. Why does such an one take 
a walk ? It is, we say, in order to have good health ; and when 
we speak thus, we believe that we are naming the cause.' 

" Let us examine closely the peculiar character of this sort of 
cause. Its characteristic is that, according to one's point of view, 
the same fact may be taken either as cause or as effect. Health 
is undoubtedly the cause of the walk ; but it is also its effect. 
On the one hand, the health does not come until after the walk, 
and as a consequence of the same ; it is because a certain movement 
1 " Les Causes Finales, " quatri^me 6dition, Paris, 1001. 



Mechanism and Teleology 533 

has been executed by my will, and, under its direction, by my 
limbs, that the state of well-being has resulted ; but, on the other 
hand, in another sense, it was to obtain this state of well-being 
that I took the walk ; for without the hope, the desire, the antici- 
pation of the benefit of health, perhaps I should not have gone 
out, and my limbs would have remained at rest. One man kills 
another : in a sense, the death of the latter has had as its cause 
the act of killing, that is, the act of burying a dagger in a living 
body, a mechanical cause without which the death would not have 
resulted; but, again, the act of killing has had as determining 
cause the will to kill ; and the death of the victim, foreseen and 
resolved upon in advance by the criminal, has been the determin- 
ing cause of the crime. Thus, a final cause is a fact that may, in 
a sense, be regarded as the cause of its own cause ; as, however, it 
is impossible for it to be a cause before it exists, the true cause is 
not the fact itself, but its idea. In other words, it is a foreseen 
effect which could have had no existence had it not been fore- 
seen." ^ 

To this definition of final cause M. Janet sees that some will 
be inclined to offer objections. The definition is adjusted to the 
most striking instance of final cause which falls within our knowl- 
edge. Man clearly foresees ends, and consciously chooses the 
means to their attainment ; but we cannot assume that the same 
conscious prevision presides over the instinctive actions of the 
brute ; and still farther down in the scale we find the tendency 
of all organized matter to arrange itself in conformity with the 
idea of a living whole. 

" Hence, reflective consciousness does not in fact exist every- 
where where we find or think we find ends in nature ; but, wher- 
ever we suppose such ends, we cannot but conceive of the final effect 
as represented in advance, if not clearly and consciously, at least in 
some way or other, in the agent which produces the effect. In order 
that a fact may be called a final cause, it is necessary that the whole 
series of phenomena summoned to produce it should be subordi- 
nated to it. This phenomenon, not yet produced, governs and 
commands the whole series, which would plainly be incomprehen- 
sible and contrary to every law of causality if the phenomenon 
did not have some sort of existence — an ideal existence — before 
the combination of which it is at once cause and result. Let us 

ipp. 1-2. 



534 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

say, then, taking up and correcting the definition given above, 
that the final cause, as given us in experience, is an effect which 
is, if not foreseen, at \Q?i^i predetermined^ and which, because of 
this predetermination, conditions and commands the series of 
phenomena of which it appears to be the result. Hence it is, once 
again, a fact that may be regarded as the cause of its own cause." ^ 

jNI. Janet maintains, with great justice, that we should never 
think of ends as existing in nature, were man not conscious of 
selecting ends and employing means to their attainment : " Expe- 
rience presents us unmistakably, in a given case, with a real and 
certain cause, which we call the final cause : is it not legitimate 
to assume the same cause in analogous cases, with a degree of 
probability increasing or diminishing with the analogy itself? 
We are not passing from a thing of one kind to things of a wholly 
different kind ; but, in the same general class, that is to say, 
within the realm of nature, given a certain number of homogeneous 
facts, we follow the thread of analogy as far as it will lead us, 
and up to the point at which it abandons us. This is, in truth, 
the inductive process that the human mind follows in the affirma- 
tion of final causes outside of ourselves. "^ 

This analogical argument leads M. Janet far ; it reveals to 
him the presence of final causes over a very wide field, and it 
brings him ultimately to the real goal of his inquiry, the proof 
that a Divine Mind is revealed in nature. As the reader will 
see later, I am in hearty sympathy with the general view of nature 
advocated by M. Janet, though I may differ from him in some 
details. That not merely the little world of man, but that the 
great world beyond him, is to be regarded as revealing mind — 
a Divine Mind — I feel impelled to maintain. That the argu- 
ment may be carried so far, all are not prepared to admit. But 
there is no one who does not recognize the presence of final causes 
— I here use the expression without delaying to criticise it — at 
least somewhere in the realm that lies beyond the circumscribed 
field of conscious human activities. 

Surely no one will care to deny that certain of the brutes 
sometimes fix upon ends and attain them by the employment of 
means, much as man does. And in the phenomena of instinct, 
and, beyond and below this, in a very wide circle of phenomena 
presented by living organisms, whether of a high or of a low order, 

ip. 4. a p. 131. 



Mechanism and Teleology 535 

we see something so analogous to the adjustment of means to 
ends with which we are familiar in the sphere of human activities, 
that it seems eminently natural for us to find in nature a wide 
distribution of ends and not merely of results. This way of con- 
templating the phenomena of nature is reflected in common speech, 
and even in the language of science, as one may convince oneself 
by the perusal of some standard text-book of physiology or of 
biology. 

With the scope of the argument from analogy this chapter is 
not concerned. M. Janet is, as I have said, quite right in main- 
taining that the whole edifice rests upon the foundation, furnished 
by our experience, that man fixes upon ends and employs means. 
It is one thing to seek to discover what phenomena in nature 
may properly be described as ends, and it is another to strive to 
attain to a clear conception of the significance of the concept itself. 
This is our present task, and we can best perform it by study- 
ing the final cause in the most striking instance in which it can 
come before our contemplation. 

When we come to examine closely M. Janet's account of it, 
we cannot but remark certain loosenesses of expression. Thus, 
we are told that it is characteristic of the final cause that, according 
to one's point of view, the same fact may be taken as cause or as 
effect. Health is the cause of the walk ; it is also its effect. It 
is the latter, because health does not come until after the walk ; 
it is the former, because, without the idea of health, the limbs 
would not have been set in motion. 

Reflection upon this illustration compels us to enter a double 
objection to the statement that the same fact may he taken as cause 
or as effect. In the first place, health and the idea of health are 
by no means the same fact. The one is a fact in the physical 
world, and the other a fact in the realm of mind ; they are not 
only two facts, but two facts belonging to different orders ; and it 
is surely inadmissible to think of them and to speak of them so 
vaguely that they seem to melt into one. Spinoza emphasizes 
this objection. 

In the second place, when we place the words "cause" and 
" effect " in a relation of contrast, we almost necessarily suggest 
that we have reference to the order of efficient causes and their 
effects — that we are using words in a natural and unambiguous 
sense, and are putting together what might be expected to go 



536 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

together. It would, indeed, be strange could the same identical 
fact be at once cause and effect in an unambiguous sense. But 
that the same fact should be cause in one sense and effect in an 
unrelated sense is a truth not even worthy of remark. The same 
tiresome old rake may be at once " fast " and " slow " in senses 
of the word sanctioned by popular usage. The sentence under 
criticism appears to assume tacitly that a cause is a cause, and 
that the different senses of the word need not be kept so very 
clearly distinct. Spinoza recognized but one sense of the word 
" cause," and was led to deny the existence of final causes; M. Janet 
accepts the final cause, but he seems to assimilate it to the efficient. 
When one does this, one loses sight of its true nature. 

That this confusion really is present seems to be made even 
more clear in the second illustration given. A man's death has 
had as its cause the act of killing ; but the act of killing has had 
as determining cause the will to kill, and thus the death of the 
victim, foreseen and willed by the criminal, has been the deter- 
mining cause of the crime. 

What, precisely, does this mean ? Does determining cause mean 
efficient cause ? Apparently it does, and we are to understand 
that a certain mental phenomenon is the efficient cause of the act 
of killing, as the act of killing is the efficient cause of the death. 
But how can this justify one in concluding that " a final cause is 
a fact that may, in a sense, be regarded as the cause of its own 
cause " ? Of which fact are we here speaking ? Of a man's death. 
Has it been pointed out that this has been the cause of anything 
whatever? Not in the least. It has been pointed out that the 
death as foreseen and willed^ i.e. not the death itself, but the idea of it, 
has been the efficient cause of something. Whence, then, the con- 
clusion that the death is the cause of its own cause ? Evidently, 
the conclusion is the result of an identification of the death with 
a certain other phenomenon from which it is numerically distinct, 
and which is regarded as the cause of the cause of the death. And 
tlic deatli is made a, final cduse for the reason that its identification 
with an efficient cause gives it an unmistakable flavor of causality, 
while its place at the end of a series of occurrences makes it imj^os- 
sible frankly to recognize this illegitimately transferred causality 
as efficient. 

That the reasoning is not of the strictest M. Janet appears to 
recognize. He has arrived at the conclusion tliat a final cause is 



Mechanism and Teleology 537 

a fact that may, in a sense, be regarded as the cause of its own 
cause, and he goes on to show that that sense is a very loose one : 
the death cannot be a cause before it exists, and hence the true 
cause is not the death itself, but its idea. 

It would be impossible to bring out more clearly the fact that 
final causes and efficient are confused to the detriment of the 
former. Shall we accept as true without limitation the statement 
that a fact cannot be a cause before it exists ? Surely not ; this is 
true of efficient causes, but not of final. The final cause, the end, 
must come last. If it is to be a cause at all, it must be a cause 
before it exists. And what shall we say touching the statement 
that the true cause is not the fact itself, but its idea? Does this 
not deny the existence of final causes as flatly as ever they were 
denied by Spinoza ? Does it not affirm that there is really no 
cause but the efficient, and imply that a man's death, to be a cause 
at all, must be an efficient cause of something ? But what, then, 
becomes of the statement that a final cause is a fact which may 
be regarded as the cause of its own cause ? It lapses absolutely : 
nothing can be the efficient cause of its own efficient cause, and 
we have denied real existence to causes of any other sort. 

I shall not delay to discuss the emendation of the definition 
of final cause suggested by M. Janet. What can it mean to 
say that a final cause is a predetermined effect, which, in virtue 
of this predetermination, conditions and commands the series of 
phenomena of which it appears to be the result ? Is not every 
effect of an efficient cause predetermined ? And what is it to 
condition and command a series of phenomena ? Is it to con- 
dition them as the efficient cause conditions its effect ? This the 
final cause should not do ; and yet, apparently, this the final cause 
must do, for M. Janet concludes that, in virtue of this condition- 
ing, the final cause may be regarded as the cause of its own 
cause. 

It must be evident to the reader that the final cause, as such, 
the end, has been virtually abandoned by M. Janet, and something 
else has been put in its place. This something is an efficient 
cause of a certain kind — an idea ; and it is with the proof that 
such ideas exist and must be appealed to in any explanation of 
the phenomena of nature, that M. Janet concerns himself in his 
book. 

Briefly stated, his argument is as follows : Causes must not 



538 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

be multiplied unnecessarily. Where a mechanical explanation 
suffices, we need not assume final causes ; if it sufficed every- 
where, they would not have to be assumed at all. But mechan- 
ism will not suffice to explain the phenomena of nature ; hence, 
we must have recourse to final causes (i.e. to ideas). ^ 

M. Janet points out that there are in nature an indefinite 
number of relatively independent chains of causes and effects. 
Where these cross each other, we have complicated effects which 
we attribute to " chance." I may, in gambling, bet upon the red 
or the black ; I may win ; it is clear that my choice has not 
influenced the turning up of a given card, nor has the dis- 
position of the cards affected my choice. The harmony which has 
resulted is a chance harmony. But when a given coordination of 
phenomena has recurred repeatedly, when the coordination is a 
constant one, a cause must be sought, not merely for each phe- 
nomenon concerned, but for the constancy of the coordination. 
This every one recognizes. When we turn our attention to certain 
striking instances of such coordination, for example, when we 
consider certain mechanisms constructed by man, we see that a 
reference to final causes is indispensable ; the coordination can 
only be explained by the fact that an end was held in view. This 
furnishes us with a type of explanation which serves to piece out 
the deficiencies of the mechanical explanation of nature.^ 

Now, the question before us is, how much of M. Janet's 
doctrine must a man reject, when once he has been led to 
accept the parallelistic view of mind and matter which I have 
advocated ? 

For one thing, he must reject the confusion of the final cause 
proper, the end., with the idea of the end. These should be 
distinguished by every one, but their confusion appears to be 
peculiarly unpardonable in one who relegates ideas and material 
things to different orders. When one has rejected this, one has 
lost nothing save the misleading statement that something is to be 
regarded as the cause of its own cause — in other words, one lias 
not lost, but gained. 

In the second place, he must reject the notion that ideas, 

1 Preface, iii, v. 

2 Chapters I, I II, V. I am here only concerned with the argument for the assump- 
tion of final causes in the first instance. Whether they may ultimately be regarded 
as embracing all nature is another question. 



Mechanism and Teleology 539 

mental phenomena, must be assumed to play the role of efficient 
causes of a certain type, and to supplement the deficiencies of 
mechanical causes. He cannot patch up a machine with imma- 
terial patches. Does it follow from this that mental phenomena 
are not to be assumed, and that the conceptions purpose and end 
are to be eliminated from our view of nature ? Not in the least. 
What has been rejected need cause no concern to the plain man, 
for his world of purposes and ends remains unshaken. Nor is the 
analogical argument, upon which M. Janet has depended for the 
extension of the realm of purposes and ends, affected in the least. 

This ought to become evident to one who grasps clearly the 
distinction between efficient causes and final, and the significance 
of that distinction. The distinction, of course, exists in common 
thought, but, like other distinctions drawn in common thought, it 
is somewhat vaguely apprehended. The plain man recognizes 
that there is a physical order of causes and effects. The finger 
on the trigger ignites the powder, the bullet leaves the gun, it 
reaches a certain point, and a man is laid low. The same man 
recognizes that there is also a different way of viewing the 
occurrence, in which the fall of a man is related in a peculiar 
way to an idea. It is no longer merely a result^ it is an end. 

Now, the order of physical causes is imperfectly known to 
any one ; to the plain man it is very imperfectly known ; and, in 
certain instances, the fact there is such an order may be quite 
overlooked. What that order may be is always a legitimate 
subject for scientific investigation. A man raises his finger ; he 
is conscious that he thought of doing so, and he may hold that his 
intention was the cause, and the immediate cause, of the motion. 
The physiologist is not content with his view of the case, but con- 
structs for him a complicated chain of physical causes and effects 
of which he had no consciousness. The intention is no longer 
directly related to the motion of the finger — it is referred to 
some motion in the brain. It still remains true that intention 
and motion are referred to each other ; they still remain purpose 
and end, but the peculiar causal relation which was supposed to 
exist between them has been found not to exist. Investigation 
has revealed an order of causes the existence of which had been 
overlooked. 

Shall our plain man, after his conference with the physiologist, 
correct his former view only so far as to maintain that the inten- 



540 Other Mhids, and the Realm of Minds 

tion is not the proximate cause of the movement of the finger, 
but is the proximate cause of the motion in the brain — a cause 
as the latter is the cause of what succeeds it ? It is open to him 
to do so, and it is undoubtedly what he inclines to do. But it 
should be remarked that his first impression of the relation of 
intention and movement has been found to be erroneous, and 
has been replaced by a view which is the result of some scientific 
investigation. The second position which he takes is not the 
result of a direct appeal to experience, if by a direct appeal to 
experience we mean an appeal to an experience unenriched by 
the fruits of scientific thought. It is really an appeal to science, 
and whether it is wise to take and keep this position is a question 
to be decided, not by the plain man, but by the scholar, for it is 
only the latter who is in a position to judge whether what is 
known of mental phenomena and of physical justifies us in re- 
garding them as standing in the relation indicated. The con- 
siderations brought forward in certain of the preceding chapters ^ 
seem to make it clear that the relation between intention and 
movement cannot be a causal relation at all, in the usual sense 
of the word cause, i.e. they seem to show that it is absurd to 
connect ideas and movements as one may connect movement with 
movement. 

I beg the reader to observe that the plain man found in his 
experience at the outset the relation of intention and end. He 
intended to move his finger and his finger moved. He has reason 
to believe that whenever he has a similar mental experience his 
finger will move. This is to him a very important fact, and its 
significance for his world of interests and desires cannot be 
overestimated. 

Now, when he has taken counsel of the physiologist, and has 
become, as to speak, a Cartesian, recognizing a series of physical 
causes resulting in the movement of the finger, but placing at 
the head of the series his will to move, his intention, — when he 
has done this, he has left unaffected the relation of intention and 
end which he found in his experience in the first instance. He 
has only modified his conception of how intentions and ends are 
connected with one another ; he has come to a clearer conception 
of the world-order, and he finds in it, as before, the relation in 
which he is so much interested. 

1 Chapters XVII to XXIV. 



Mechanism and Teleology 541 

Suppose that he goes farther, and becomes a parallelist. Do 
intentions and ends disappear from his world, or even change in 
any manner their proper character ? Is the relation of intention 
to end to be regarded as less constant, as less to be depended upon ? 

Surely not. The man has attained to a much clearer idea of 
the world-order. He no longer confuses mental phenomena and 
physical, throwing them together as though they did not belong 
to distinct classes. But his world is emphatically a world of 
matter and mind, and he has no excuse for overlooking any sig- 
nificant relations among the phenomena of which it is composed. 
If he refuses to place an idea in the one chain of causes and 
effects with a series of movements in matter, he, nevertheless, 
regards the idea as holding to certain movements in matter — to 
brain changes — a relation as uniform and unvarying as that 
between physical causes and their effects. The man who is not 
a parallelist connects intentions with ends ; so does the paral- 
lelist ; and, when he is rightly understood, he is found to cast 
no doubt whatever upon the uniformity of the relation. 

But in the argument for final causes given above — it might 
better be called the argument for ideal causes — certain ideas 
were assumed to exist on the ground that certain coordinations 
of phenomena, given in experience, necessitated the assumption of 
such ideas, as sufficient cause. If one maintains that ideas cannot 
be the causes of material changes, does one not lose one's reason 
for assuming the ideas? Does not the general argument for 
final (ideal) causes lapse ? 

I beg the reader to recall to mind what I have said in discuss- 
ing the existence of other minds and their distribution. ^ The 
argument for other minds is quite independent of the assumption 
that mental phenomena stand in causal relations with material. 
Of course, if a man assumes that intention and end, idea and 
movement, as he observes them in his experience, are related as 
efficient cause and effect, it is but natural for him to generalize 
and to maintain that the ideas which the argument from analogy 
leads him to assume, when he contemplates certain complexes of 
phenomena, must stand in a causal relation to those complexes. 
But he whose reflections upon mind and matter have led him to 
correct the first hasty interpretations of common thought, may 
maintain that his own intention, his idea, is not related to his 
1 Chapters XXVII and XXVIII. 



542 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

end, to the movement, as cause is related to effect, but is to be 
regarded as the concomitant of what is so rehited, of certain 
brain-changes wliich are themselves unknown. Upon this basis 
he may generalize precisely as did the other man. He does not 
assume ideas to piece out the deficiencies of a mechanism, but he 
does assume ideas ; and there is, as I have said, nothing in his 
doctrine that tends to render less significant the relation of 
intention and end. 

The reasonings of the parallelist need really cause no concern 
to the plain man. It does not matter one whit to him whether his 
idea stands in a strictly causal relation to a given motion or series 
of motions in matter, or does not. What interests him is to know 
that the relation of intention and end is a constant one and may 
be counted upon with confidence. To be sure, when he is told 
that his idea stands in no causal relation to his act, he is apt to 
feel misgivings. When he is called an epi-phenomenon, a shadow, 
an otiose thing, his feelings are outraged. It is only natural that 
they should be. 

The application of these abusive epithets necessarily suggests 
that his idea, his plan, is a thing without significance. He forms 
a plan ; he carries it out ; there are changes in the physical world 
which would not, he is sure, have taken place had he ne\er formed 
the plan. Is he to be told that this planning has had nothing to 
do with the result? Does not every one say: I went, because I 
decided to do so ? I built the house, because I wished a house ? 
Must this because be dropped out altogether, and must his own 
activity be repudiated ? 

I insist strenuously upon the fact that, in rejecting all such 
insinuations, the man is entirely in the right. It is of the utmost 
importance to bear in mind that, if the parallelistic doctrine which 
has been advocated in this volume is correct, and if the phenom- 
ena of the subjective order and those of the objective order do 
correspond, as I have maintained, then it is quite true that, if the 
man had not formed a plan, the changes in question would not have 
taken place in the physical world. This does not mean that his plan 
and those changes stand in the one causal nexus. But the state- 
ment is literally true, nevertheless : had he not formed the plan, 
the changes would not have taken place. The relation is a con- 
stant one ; as constant, if the doctrine of parallelism be true, as 
any relation between physical causes and their effects. 



Mechanism and Teleology 543 

May we go farther, and say : The changes took place because 
he formed the plan ? Surely we may, if our purpose be to point 
out, by such a mode of speech, the constant relation between plan 
and accomplishment — to dwell upon the indispensableness of the 
plan. Without some such form of expression we cannot get on ; 
and I have indicated above that it is foolish to torture common 
speech until it becomes a stumbling-block and an offence. We 
are totally ignorant of the brain-changes which, in the physical 
order, correspond to the formation of the plan, and which stand in 
a causal relation with the accomplishment. It is of no use to refer 
to them, when we are trying to connect phenomenon with phe- 
nomenon in a serviceable way. But the plan is open to inspec- 
tion, it is known, it is indispensable to the accomplishment ; and 
the plain man is right in objecting to any form of expression 
which minimizes its importance. 

Perhaps it will be remarked : Ah ! but is it indispensable ? 
Is it not, at least, conceivable, since plan and accomplishment do 
not stand in the one causal nexus, and since the series of causes 
that leads to the result is complete without the plan — is it not, 
at least, conceivable that the result might have been produced 
without any plan at all ? I answer, it is not conceivable in the 
only world with which we have to do, the world of matter and of 
minds which is revealed in our experience. What is possible and 
impossible must be discovered by an investigation into the consti- 
tution of this world. It is not profitable to speculate regarding 
the possibility that, in worlds differently constituted from ours, 
physical results of the sort which we justly regard as indicative 
of the existence of purpose, might be produced and yet have no 
such significance. 

To most men the denial that there is a causal relation between 
phenomena seems tantamount to the assertion that the relation 
between them is an accidental one. It is for this reason that the 
denial that plan and accomplishment are causally related seems to 
the plain man to make his plan a thing of little moment. But, if 
the parallelist is right, there are relations — the relations between 
mental phenomena and physical — which are not causal, and yet 
which it would be absurd to call accidental. They are as much 
to be depended upon as any relations which obtain between phe- 
nomena ; they belong to the very constitution of the world in 
which we live, and to overlook them or to suppose them less 



544 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

stable than they are, is seriously to misconceive the nature of 
that world. 

Both parallelist and plain man must admit that it is not every 
plan that is followed by accomplishment. Even the man who 
desires to move his finger may find himself unable to do so, for 
various reasons. But the probability that, in a given instance, 
plan will be followed by accomplishment is just the same for the 
plain man and for the parallelist. The former need have no hesi- 
tation in allowing the latter to open his eyes for him ; he is in 
danger of losing absolutely nothing save a few misconceptions 
which it will in no wise hurt him to lose. 

When his eyes are once thoroughly opened he will see that it 
is wholly unjust to apply to mental phenomena such offensive 
epithets as " epi-phenomenon " and "shadow." They necessarily 
suggest that the mind is not active, that it does nothing. Before 
making so serious a charge as this, it is surely incumbent upon the 
philosopher to investigate carefully the meaning of such statements 
as that, in a given instance, a man is active, or does something, 
and that, in another instance, he is passive, or has something done 
to him. 

In an earlier chapter ^ I have pointed out that, in the realm of 
the purely physical, the notions of activity and passivity have no 
place. They must be carefully distinguished from those of cause 
and effect. A man is hurrying to a railway-station ; that is, a 
complex system of atoms, which is, as a system, constantly under- 
going some change, is at the same time as a whole changing its 
space-relations to other systems or groups of atoms. The man is 
struck down by a falling tile ; that is, the above-mentioned group 
of atoms has undergone a considerable change in consequence of 
its having come into a certain relation with a given group of atoms, 
and a certain series of motions has been brought to an end. 
There is no moment at which the actual state of affairs — the 
position and motion of every atom within and without the man — 
may not (theoretically) be accounted for as the result of mechan- 
ical causes ; and there is no moment at which the changes which 
are taking place can be referred wholly to his body or wholly to 
what is outside of it. 

As he runs, he is not independent of the ground upon which 
he treads ; when he falls, the tile cannot be regarded as the sole 

1 Chapter XV. 



Mechanism and Teleology 545 

cause of the change. He falls as much because he is what he is 
and where he is, as he does because the tile is what it is and has 
been moving as it has. From the point of view of mechanics, we 
have a series of changes, and we have causes of those changes. 
Those causes always embrace both the man and his environment. 
Hence, it is absurd to say that the man is the cause of the advance 
up the street, and the tile is the cause of the fall to the ground. 
It is absurd, that is, to speak thus when one is attempting to be 
scientifically accurate ; to avoid the statement when common 
intercourse makes it convenient to use it, savors of pedantry. 

We do not, then, regard something as active, as doing this or 
that, merely on the ground that it is an efficient cause ; nor do we 
regard it as passive, as suffering, as having something done to it, 
merely on the ground that it is an effect. In its encounter with 
the tile, the man's body is a concurrent cause of its own demoli- 
tion — or, to speak more accurately, its being what it is at the one 
instant is a concurrent cause of its being what it is at the next. 
It is cause as well as effect ; cause at the one instant and effect at 
the next. What, then, can we mean by calling the man passive ? 
Why do we distinguish so clearly between the headlong chase and 
the sudden fall ? 

We draw the distinction simply because we do not remain 
within the realm of the purely physical. To physical changes we 
relate mental phenomena, and we make classifications which would 
be impossible but for this. When a man is occupied in catching 
a train, when he is, as we say, active, we recognize that he has a 
purpose and an end. That is to say, we recognize that what is in 
his mind is indispensable to the coming into being of a certain 
physical condition of things. When he is crushed by a falling 
tile, we know that the condition of things is not to be referred to 
an idea in his mind. Something has happened to the man ; he 
has not done it himself — these words mean nothing, when all 
reference to his mind has been left out of account. 

Now, we have seen above that the relation of plan and accom- 
plishment, of purpose and end, is not done away with in any 
manner, when the plain man attains some degree of enlightenment, 
and no longer regards his volition as the proximate cause of a 
bodily movement. We have also seen that, when he becomes still 
more enlightened, and refuses to recognize mental phenomena as 
causes at all, this same relation, in which we are necessarily so 

2n 



546 Other Minds, and the Reahn of Minds 

deeply interested, remains unaffected. And now that ive have seen 
that our notions of activity and passivity draw their whole significance 
from this relation of purpose and end, and are never to be confused 
with the notions of cause and effect, ought loe not to recognize that it is 
mere misconception to charge the parallelist with the misdemeanor 
of making the mind inactive? 

When is a man active ? When does he do something ? Is it 
not when mental phenomenon and physical fact stand in the rela- 
tion of plan and accomplishment ? Can anything be active save 
as it has a mind ? We have seen that the word has no meaning 
in the realm of the purely physical ; and a little reflection makes 
it plain that when men use it in speaking of material things they 
are employing a conception borrowed from a different sphere. 
There is a tincture of animism in common thought, and from this 
even the philosopher finds it difficult to free himself. Physical 
causes can be regarded as active only when they are more or less 
dimly conceived as endowed with minds. 

The truth is that the phenomena of our universe can be con- 
templated from more than one point of view. One may fix one's 
attention upon the order of physical causes and effects, and note 
that mental phenomena stand to certain of these in a relation 
conveniently symbolized under the figure employed by the paral- 
lelist. But any given mental phenomenon is not to be assumed 
to stand only in relation to the particular physical occurrence to 
which the physiologist directly refers it. Ideas are, through 
brains, related to the whole physical and mental universe; and, 
when these relations are taken into account, a new world of dis- 
tinctions has its birth. This is the moral world of aspirations, of 
purposes, and of ends. Nothing that the parallelist can say should 
be construed as an attack upon it. Nothing for which our expe- 
rience vouches is more real and undeniable. It is an aspect of the 
one real world consisting of matter and of mind — it is as real as 
is that world ; and he who desires something more real is capable 
of crying for what is rounder than the circle. 

Thus, all those experiences which we are in the habit of char- 
acterizing as instances of the action of mind upon matter, and of 
one mind upon another mind stand unshaken. Men form plans, 
and carry them out in action. They set before themselves ends, 
and they attain them. They come to a knowledge of tlie exist- 
ence of other minds, and they communicate with such minds. 



Mechanism and Teleology 547 

Minds are not epi-phenomena, they are not shadows, they are not 
otiose. All these things the parallelist not only may say, but must 
say, if he be a good parallelist, and understands the significance 
of his own doctrine. 

It is necessary that I should emphasize one point before bring- 
ing this chapter to a close. It has been pointed out above that an 
end is different from a mere result in that it is a phenomenon 
referred, not merely to antecedent physical phenomena, but to an 
idea. I beg the reader to observe that I have used the word " idea " 
in no equivocal sense. I have been at great pains to point out 
what we mean by ideas or mental phenomena, and how we are to 
conceive of the relation between mental phenomena and the mate- 
rial world. 1 I have indicated that an unconscious idea is an 
absurdity .2 It follows that the recognition of ends in nature 
must always imply the recognition of consciousness somewhere. 

To this some will demur. Has not the philosopher maintained 
again and again that nature may seek and attain her ends uncon- 
sciously — that there is such a thing as an immanent finality 
which does not imply consciousness ? When a mutilated newt 
reproduces its curtailed member and grows once more into the 
form proper to a creature of its kind, we have what appears to be 
the carrying out of a plan or purpose, the realization of an inten- 
tion. To suppose the batrachian mind capable of such deliberate 
foresight that the result may be attributed to it as its end seems 
absurd. No one supposes that the creature plans and attains as 
man plans and attains when he carves a statue or builds a house. 
It does not seem, then, that what undoubtedly appears to be an 
end, can be referred to the consciousness of the animal itself. 
And if a man cannot see his way clear to accepting the belief in a 
Divine Mind, must he, on that account, deny that a plan is real- 
ized, that an end is attained ? Are not the facts such as to war- 
rant him in asserting that Nature is seeking the reproduction of 
a type, and unconsciously strives to attain an end ? 

To this I answer as follows : He who says that Nature seeks 
or that Nature strives is using expressions which find their signifi- 
cance in a world not purely physical. If they are carried over to 
the merely material, it is by way of metaphor, and one must not 
be misled by one's metaphors. A man raises his gun and a bullet 
reaches the target. We relate this result as end to an idea in 
1 Chapters XXIII and XXIV. 2 chapter XXX. 



548 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

his mind. It is, however, but one out of an indefinite series of 
physical consequences which follow the pulling of the trigger. 
The man who fired the gun may be charged with producing the 
whole series, if he may be charged with producing a single mem- 
ber. Can we say he sought to produce the series ? Was it his 
purpose to have the bullet pass through a spot three metres in 
front of the target, two metres in front, one metre in front ? Did 
he aim to heat the target by the impact of the bullet, or to stir the 
air which lay in its path ? It is absurd to say that he sought to 
do these things ; these are results, not ends. In the whole physi- 
cal series we find but one term which may properly be called an 
end. It is the one term which is represented in his mind by an 
idea ; the term which stands to that idea in the relation of accom- 
plishment to plan. It is this relation, and this relation alone, that 
distinguishes this term from all the rest, and that gives it a claim 
upon the attention of the ethical philosopher, as well as upon that 
of the physicist. 

If we overlook this relation, this term becomes at once as 
insignificant as the most insignificant of those which have pre- 
ceded it or of those which may follow it to the end of time. It is 
useless to attempt to define an end in any other way than by a 
reference to this relation. Every physical fact is predetermined 
by the physical causes which have produced it, and the number of 
concurrent causes which have a share in the result may be enor- 
mous. If a given fact recurs repeatedly, and if a multitude of 
distinct causes appear to be concerned in its production, it is absurd 
to attribute the constantly recurring fact to " chance." But when 
we say all this, we have not shown that the fact is to be regarded 
as an end. Death and dissolution are as universal as birth and 
growth, but men do not incline to regard death and dissolution as 
the end of the development of the organism. Some facts they 
tend to look upon as ends, and some they do not. It is only from 
one point of view that their principle of selection becomes intel- 
ligible. 

As I have said earlier in this chapter, I am not now concerned 
with the scope of the argument which passes from purpose and end 
as revealed in the realm of human activities to purpose and end 
as revealed throughout the realm of nature. That men do follow 
the thread of analogy, and interpret nature after a fasliion sug- 
gested by their knowledge of man, there can be no doubt. They 



Mechanism and Teleology 549 

carry over to a broader field the conceptions of purpose and of end. 
And I beg the reader to observe that he who speaks of nature as 
seeking her ends unconsciously is at once admitting and denying 
this analogy. If a given physical fact beyond the realm of human 
activities bears to the facts which lie within that realm a sufficiently 
close analogy to warrant us in regarding it as an end^ it is a fact 
which we are warranted in referring to an idea^ to consciousness. 
To retain the notion of end and throw away the notion of purpose 
is to retain the notion of helow and throw away the notion of above. 
One cannot blow hot and cold in this fashion. It is quite permis- 
sible to declare the supposed analogy a false one ; but then one 
must abandon the conception of end as well as that of purpose. 

I hope I have succeeded in making clear in the preceding 
pages that the world in which mechanism reigns supreme and the 
moral world of purposes and ends are not and never need be at 
war with one another. It is not necessary to shatter the former 
in order that, upon its ruins, we may base the stately structure of 
the latter. There are not really two worlds ; there is but one, 
^nd that one may be contemplated now under this aspect, now 
under that. I should think this view of the case would be wel- 
comed as a relief. It relieves one from the secret hope that the 
labors of the man of science will be in vain ; that his efforts to 
prove the world of matter and motion the orderly thing he sus- 
pects it to be will be doomed to disappointment. It saves the 
timid man from the unethical temptation to rejoice in human 
ignorance, and to regard those who would enlighten him as heralds 
■of misfortune. The world of matter and of motion is not our 
enemy, but our friend ; we cause ourselves gratuitous unhappiness 
when we mistake its face. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

FATALISM, "FREE-WILL," AND DETERMINISM 

Laius, king of Thebes, was warned by an oracle that there 
was danger to his throne and to his life if his infant son were 
allowed to grow up. The child was delivered to a herdsman 
with orders for its destruction. The herdsman pierced its feet, 
with the intention of exposing it to the elements on Mount 
Cithieron ; but the little creature did not meet this cruel death ; 
it was given to a shepherd, who carried it to King Polybus of 
Corinth, and by him the child was adopted and called (Edipus. 

Long after these events, (Edipus, who had arrived at man's 
estate, learned from an oracle that he was destined to kill his 
father. He left the kingdom of his reputed father, Polybus. In 
a narrow way he met Laius, who, with an attendant, w^as driving 
to Delphi. (Edipus refused the supposed stranger the right of 
way, and the king's attendant retaliated by killing one of his 
horses. (Edipus, furious at the deed, slew both master and man. 
Thus did Laius and CEdipus, puppets in the hand of a higher 
power, fulfil the oracles against which they had risen in rebellion. 

The story stands as an admirable illustration of the fatalist's 
view of things. Certain ends are fixed ; they will be brought 
about, whatever may happen. We know that if (Edipus had 
taken another road, he would still have met Laius sooner or later. 
The man was doomed ; his death was a thing allotted (el^apfxevr)^ ; 
it was predicted (^fatum). 

In the Greek literature we find two conceptions of fate. " On 
the one hand. Fate was a decree, dependent for its effectiveness 
upon the divine will. On the other hand, it was personified, and 
conceived of as an independent principle controlling the acts of 
gods and of men."i In the "Iliad," for example, success and 
failure of Greek and Trojan are represented as decided, not by 

1 See Alexander's "Theories of the Will in the History of Philosophy," N.Y. 
1898, pp. 8 ff. 

650 



Fatalism, "Free-willy' and Determinism 551 

the actors on the stage, but by a power behind the scenes. Given 
a god who has made up his mind to save Hector or Achilles at all 
costs, the independent actions of Hector and Achilles become of 
little significance. The struggle is really a struggle between 
protecting divinities, and the decision of Zeus appears to be the 
final court of appeal. However, this court cannot be regarded 
as ultimate in every instance. When Zeus is asked to save 
Sarpedon, he refuses on the ground that his death is fixed by 
Fate. 

The conception of Fate is not necessarily an irreligious one. 
Whether Sarpedon be doomed by Zeus or by some power above 
Zeus, we have fatalism, provided only the agency of Sarpedon 
himself and of his fellow-actors be regarded as having no real 
bearing upon the result. To the Stoic elfiapfievrj was identical 
with TrpovoLa or Divine Providence. The fatum moJiametanum 
which Christians have condemned in Moslems is anything but 
an irreligious doctrine. It is but an insistence upon the fixity 
of the Divine Decrees. And although we are not accustomed to 
use the word " fatalism " in speaking of the doctrine of the election 
of the individual soul which has obtained in the Christian Church, 
we are compelled to admit that some of the forms which it has 
taken in the past make of the doctrine of predestination nothing 
less than a fatalism. 

Thus, Augustine tells us that comparatively few men are to 
be saved. Much the larger part of humanity will be damned : 
'•'' praedestinati sunt in aeternum ignem ire cum diabolo.^' For 
these Christ did not die ; and did the Church know who they 
are, it would not pray for them. They have never been in a 
position to choose the good, for the free-will granted to Adam 
was lost in the first sin, and lost for all. Since then, men have 
been free to do wrong, but not free to do right. The elect have 
been chosen as subjects to exhibit God's mercy, and the others 
have been made examples of God's justice. Shall not the potter 
make of the clay what he will ? He has a perfect right to throw 
away the whole lump, and we should be devoutly thankful that 
it has pleased him to save some. 

Of course, the doctrine of predestination may be so expressed 
as not to be a fatalism at all. It may recognize that the will of 
the individual is not without some share in the event which 
absorbs its attention. It may be a determinism, that is to say; 



552 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

and what it means to be a determinism I shall set forth a little 
later. But here I wish to insist that tlie peculiar way of looking 
at things which characterizes the fatalist does not belong by 
prescriptive right to the irreligious man, to the pagan, to the 
Moslem, or to the Christian. A man belonging to any one of 
these classes, may, if he be sufficiently unwise, become a fatalist. 
He may dislike the word, and may avoid its use, except when he 
is speaking of men who hold opinions which he strongly repro- 
bates. And yet, when we examine his thought, we may see that 
what separates him from the objects of his disapproval is not their 
fatalism, but certain other convictions which have no necessary 
connection with it. It is well to remember that it is quite pos- 
sible to be a fatalist without believing in a blind fate, and without 
frothing about one's "star" or one's "destiny." 

To be a fatalist it is only necessary to regard ends as fixed, 
while holding that the means, which might be expected to lead to 
their realization, are a matter of indifference. Fatalism empha- 
sizes the helplessness of man, and maintains that his lot is deter- 
mined independently of his own action. The oracle predicts that 
CEdipus will be the death of Laius, but nothing is said of the way 
in which that disaster will be ushered into existence. The whole 
story leaves us with the impression that neither of the actors in 
the tragedy is really an actor — that neither contributes to a result 
which is fixed quite independently of all he may elect to do. 
Mohammed exhorts his followers to fight bravely, assuring them 
that " no soul can die except by permission of God, and according 
to what is written in the book that contains the determinations of 
things." 1 This gives the lie to the proverb that he who fights 
And runs away may live to fight another day. It places the war- 
rior and the stay-at-home upon the same basis, and utterly con- 
demns all modern methods of life insurance. There is no danger 
in going to war, for what mortal can render untrue what is writ- 
ten in the book which contains the determinations of things? 
And as for Augustine, some passages from his pen arouse in the 
reader a certain wonder that their author could have regarded it 
as at all necessary for either elect or non-elect to feel any sense 
of responsibility touching an event so palpably beyond man's 
jurisdiction. 2 

1 Koran, Chapter III. 

2 E.ij. ''The City of God," XXI, 12, 24; " Encheiridion," 98, 99. 



Fatalism, "Free-will,'' and Determinism 553 

The influences that have inclined men to fatalism are not diffi- 
cult to trace. Primitive man has necessarily forced upon his 
attention the fact that a vast number of things occur in nature 
over which he has no control whatever. The wind, the rain, the 
inundation, the earthquake, the drought that parches his crops, 
the dread visitations of disease — before these and such as these 
he is as a straw on the surface of a stream, or as a flying leaf. 
He must accept what is allotted to him, and good or evil fortune 
comes down upon him independently of his own exertions. With 
progressive enlightenment his horizon widens, and his helplessness 
undergoes some diminution. But, however far man may progress, 
his condition is always such as to keep him mindful of the fact 
that the course of his life is, at least in large part, decided for him 
by something external to himself. 

The emphasis laid upon this varies with individuals and with 
communities. Individual temperament, social characteristics, 
institutions, traditions, all make their influence felt. The trend 
to fatalism remains the same in men of a certain type, even when 
their views of nature differ widely. One may be so impressed by 
the conception of the Mechanism of the Universe as to refuse to 
man his rightful place in the world. On the other hand, one 
may be so penetrated with the conviction of the Majesty of God, 
that a human unit becomes to one scarcely a thing to take into 
account. Atheist and theist alike may exaggerate the impotence 
of man, and many dissociate end and means in an unreasonable 
fashion. Man is weak ; he is a speck in the illimitable system of 
the universe ; but he exists and he acts nevertheless. It is not 
fatalism to recognize that his sphere of action is limited; it is 
fatalism to deny that he has a hand in those things for which 
experience seems to show that he is, at least in part, responsible. 
We may freely admit that our utmost efforts w^ill not prevent the 
moon from circling around the earth as she always does ; but if 
we maintain that the actions of GEdipus and the actions of Laius 
have no bearing upon the lot of QEdipus and of Laius we talk 
nonsense. 

Thus, it is by no means an inexplicable thing that men should 
become fatalists. But it is clear that fatalism is an unreasonable 
doctrine, and that the dissociation of end and means characteristic 
of it indicates a very imperfect comprehension of the world-order 
of efficient causes and effects. The fatalist does not make every- 



554 Other Minds y and the Realm of Minds 

thing a predetermined end ; he selects what seems to him important, 
and he leaves at loose ends what seems insignificant. The death 
of Laius was predicted by the oracle. Laius was a king, and wor- 
tliy of such honor ; but the servant and the horse seem to have lost 
their lives accidentally. The encouragement to fight bravely, in 
view of the fact that " no soul can die except by permission of 
God, and according to what is written in the book that contains 
the determinations of things," must emanate from and be addressed 
to an illogical mind. If it be true that each death is thus recorded 
in advance, it is not worth while to fight at all, for one cannot by 
fighting hasten the death of a single enemy. Only he who arbi- 
trarily enters certain names in that book, and forgets to enter 
others, can take any comfort in the exhortation. 

Fatalism is, thus, a thoroughly unreasonable doctrine. In the 
stream of things it isolates this fact or that and makes it indepen- 
dent of its setting. From the point of view of ethics the doctrine 
is strongly to be condemned. He who proclaims that ends are 
fixed independently of means does all that in him lies to paralyze 
the energies of his hearer. It is quite true that men imbued with 
fatalistic beliefs have at times acted with desperate energy, but 
this only means that men have at times been desperately illogical. 
Their doctrine is an absurd one, and its influence cannot but be 
harmful in the long run. 

It is of the utmost importance to remember that fatalism is not 
a scientific doctrine. An insistence upon this point is the more 
necessary in view of the fact that a multitude of persons confuse 
fatalism with determinism. But fatalism is the doctrine of the 
ignorant and superstitious man, who has not yet risen to the concep- 
tion of a world-order. It is just his arbitrary view of things that 
it is the concern of the man of science to abolish in favor of some- 
thing more enlightened. 

So much for fatalism. Now let us examine the doctrine 
which we usually find contrasted with it, the doctrine of 
"free-will." 

Democritus of Abdera had taught that the elements of the 
world are atoms and void space. The atoms differ from each 
other in size, shape, and position, and they are in motion. Void 
space, atoms, and motion are eternal ; there is no chance^ nothing 
liappens without a cause ; the clash of the atoms has resulted neces- 
sarily in vortices which have grown into worlds. Perhaps Democ- 



Fatalism, "Free-will,'' and Determinism 555 

ritus taught that the original motion of the atoms was a fall through 
space, and that the larger and heavier, falling more rapidly than 
the others, drove them to the collisions which had this happy result, 
but there is some uncertainty upon this point. 

The atomistic doctrine was taken up and somewhat modified by 
Epicurus, the father of such as believe in "free-will." How he 
conceived a rain of atoms and the origination of a world is vividly 
set before us by his disciple Lucretius : — 

"When bodies are borne downwards sheer through void by 
their own weights, at quite uncertain times and uncertain spots 
they push themselves a little from their course : you just and only 
just can call it a change of inclination. If they were not used to 
swerve, they would all fall down, like drops of rain, through the 
deep void, and no clashing would have been begotten nor blow 
produced among the first-beginnings : ^ thus nature never would 
have produced aught. 

" But if haply any one believes that heavier bodies, as they are 
carried more quickly sheer through space, can fall from above on 
the lighter and so beget blows able to produce begetting motions, 
he goes most widely astray from true reason. For whenever 
bodies fall through water and thin air, they must quicken their 
descents in proportion to their weights, because, the body of 
water and subtle nature of air cannot retard everything in equal 
degree, but more readily give way, overpowered by the heavier : 
on the other hand empty void cannot offer resistance to anything 
in any direction at any time, but must, as its nature craves, con- 
tinually give way ; and for this reason all things must be moved 
and borne along with equal velocity though of unequal weights 
through the unresisting void. Therefore heavier things will 
never be able to fall from above on lighter nor of themselves to 
beget blows sufficient to produce the varied motions by which 
nature carries on things. Wherefore again and again I say 
bodies must swerve a little ; and yet not more than the least 
possible ; lest we be found to be imagining oblique motions and 
this the reality should refute. For this we see to be plain and 
evident, that weights, so far as in them is, cannot travel obliquely, 
when they fall from above, at least as far as you can perceive ; 
but that nothing swerves in any case from the straight course, 
who is there that can perceive ? 

1 I.e. the atoms. 



55G OtJier Minds, and the Reahn of Minds 

"Again if all motion is ever linked together and a new motion 
ever springs from another in a fixed order and first-beginnings do 
not by swerving make some commencement of motion to break 
through the decrees of fate, that cause follow not cause from 
everlasting, whence have all living creatures here on earth — 
whence, I ask, has been wrested from the fates the power by 
which we go forward whither the will leads each, by which like- 
wise we change the direction of our motions neither at a fixed 
time nor fixed place, but when and where the mind itself has 
prompted? For beyond a doubt in these things his own will 
makes for each a beginning and from this beginning motions are 
welled through the limbs. See you not too, when the barriers 
are thrown open at a given moment, that yet the eager powers of 
the horses cannot start forward so instantaneously as the mind 
itself desires ? the whole store of matter through the whole body 
must be sought out, in order that stirred up through all the 
frame it may follow with undivided effort the bent of the mind ; 
so that you see the beginning of motion is born from the heart, 
and the action first commences in the will of the mind and next 
is transmitted through the whole body and frame. Quite differ- 
ent is the case when we move on propelled by a stroke inflicted by 
the strong might and strong compulsion of another ; for then it 
is quite clear that all the matter of the whole body moves and is 
hurried on against our inclination until the will has reined it in 
throughout the limbs. Do you see then in this case that, though 
an outward force often pushes men on and compels them fre- 
quently to advance against their will and to be hurried headlong 
on, there yet is something in our breast sufficient to struggle 
against and resist it ? And when too this something chooses, the 
store of matter is compelled sometimes to change its course 
through the limbs and frame, and after it has been forced for- 
ward, is reined in and settles back into its place. Wherefore in 
seeds ^ too you must admit the same, admit that besides blows and 
weights there is another cause of motions, from which this power 
of free action has been begotten in us, since we see that nothing 
can come from nothing. For weight forbids that all things be 
done by blows through as it were an outward force ; but that the 
mind itself does not feel an internal necessity in all its actions 
and is not as it were overmastered and compelled to bear and put 

^ I.e. the atoms. 



Fatalism, " Free-ioill,'' and Determinism 557 

up with this, is caused by a minute swerving of first-beginnings 
at no fixed part of space and no fixed time."^ 

One cannot do better than to take a good look at the " free- 
will " doctrine in its primitive form. It is well to do so for more 
than one reason. 

In the first place, it may help one to realize how erroneous is 
the current notion that this doctrine has some natural connection 
with religion and good morals, and that they may be expected to 
be found in conjunction. When Stoic and Epicurean are placed 
in contrast, it is certainly not to the advantage of the latter. And 
surely no man can regard Augustine as less religious than Pela- 
gius ; St. Thomas as less religious than Duns Scotus, Luther as 
less religious than Erasmus, and Jansenius as less religious than 
his Jesuit opponents. A glance at the history of human thought 
tempts one to maintain that men of strong religious feeling are 
less likely to become " free-willists " than other men. Their 
peculiar danger appears to be a lapse into some sort of fatalism. 
We are all more or less inclined to think that doctrines which we 
happen to find in conjunction in our own day have a natural affin- 
ity for one another. The study of the history of philosophy 
serves to correct such hasty inductions. 

In the second place, it is a good thing to read Lucretius, 
because we find portrayed in bold outline what is really character- 
istic of the "free-will" doctrine — what differentiates it from 
fatalism and from determinism. The poet points out that every 
motion must be regarded as springing from another motion in a 
fixed order, and cause be regarded as following cause from ever- 
lasting, unless we assume somewhere a commencement of motions 
— not a relative commencement, a transformation, but an abso- 
lute commencement, a causeless origination. A number of such 
causeless originations he discovers in the voluntary motions of 
man and brute, and he extends the notion of "free-will" so 
as to make it cover the erratic behavior of falling atoms. This 
behavior is not to be accounted for by a reference to the order 
of causes ; it implies a break in the causal nexus — " at quite 
uncertain times and uncertain spots they push themselves a 
little from their course." If we assume a cause for each par- 
ticular push, we are not freed from what Lucretius errone- 
ously regards as " the decrees of fate," for the causal nexus 
1 " De Rerum Natura," II, 217-293 ; tr. Munro, Cambridge, 1891. 



558 Other Minds, mid the Realm of Minds 

remains unbroken. The push must be uncaused, if we are to 
have " free-will." 

The attribution of " free-will " to atoms generally was natural 
enough in one who regarded the whole soul as composed of atoms. 
This part of the Lucretian doctrine strikes the modern reader as 
bizarre. And if he be clear-minded, the modern reader will 
criticise Lucretius on two other points as well : he will remark 
that it is a palpable inconsistency to make certain motions cause- 
less, and then to erect their very causelessness, i.e. ''free-will," 
into a cause of their origination, on the ground that *' nothing can 
come from nothing"; and he will point out that it is only an 
imperfect apprehension of the meaning of fatalism that can regard 
the denial of *' free-will " as a surrender to '• the decrees of fate." 

It is doubtful whether most " free-willists " will feel imj^elled 
to urge these objections, for both of these errors have enjoyed 
a high degree of popularity for a very long time, and their popu- 
larity appears to be undiminished. Discussions touching the 
freedom of the will constantly show a tendency to lapse into a 
sponge of words in which all clear distinctions disappear. One 
thing is done by Lucretius, which, I feel safe in saying, will be 
warmly approved by almost all " free-willists "; he carefully limits 
the amount of "free-will" that anything may be permitted to 
enjoy. Bodies may only push themselves a little from their 
course : '* You just and only just can call it a change of inclina- 
tion." Too much "free-will" can cause the " f ree-willist " noth- 
ing save alarm and apprehension. That there is good reason for 
his uneasiness, I shall show a little farther on. 

Before going farther I must enter into a brief explanation 
for the purpose of avoiding verbal misunderstanding. I have 
shown ^ that mental phenomena must not be regarded as standing 
in the one causal nexus with physical phenomena, and that no 
mental fact should be viewed as, in the strict sense of the word, 
the cause of a motion in matter. I have also pointed out^ that 
the acceptance of this truth does not in the least coQipel one to 
repudiate the conceptions of purpose and end, to declare the 
mind inactive, and to regard as an illusion human responsibility. 

I have furthermore laid much emphasis upon the fact that 
ordinary modes of speech convey truth, and are not lightly to be 
cast aside. One may use them ; in most instances it is desirable 
> Chapter XXXI. ^ Chapter XXXIL 



Fatalism, '^ Free-will,'' and Determinism 559 

to use them ; but one must be careful not to be misled by them. 
We expect even the man of science to say that he climbed the 
Rigi to see the sun rise, and we would think it highly unreasonable 
to regard his words as proof that he is ignorant of the revolution 
of the earth upon its axis. And the most thoroughgoing of 
parallelists may say: The first time I sat down it was because 
I slipped ; the second time, it was because I willed to do so. 
This does not mean that he is abandoning his parallelism and 
making a mental phenomenon the cause of a bodily motion. He 
can answer at once, when he is taxed with inconsistency, that the 
cause, in the strict sense of the word, is not the mental phenome- 
non, but some change in the brain to which the mental phenome- 
non is referred as an invariable concomitant. He may claim 
that he has a perfect right to use expressions in ordinary use, 
without translating them into parallelistic language, so long as 
nothing is to be gained by such a translation. It goes without 
saying that he has no right to use any expression that is incapa- 
ble of such a translation. 

I say all this because I am resolved to make use in this chap- 
ter of the common modes of speech, and to avoid emphasizing 
the doctrine of parallelism. This I do for two reasons : first, it 
is convenient to speak as the plain man speaks, and, second, it is 
desirable that the reader should realize that the choice between 
fatalism, " free-will," and determinism is in no way logically 
conditioned by one's choice of parallelism or of the opposing 
doctrine. 

The parallelist may be a fatalist, a " free-willist," or a 
determinist ; so may his opponent. To be a " f ree-willist " each 
has only to deny, with Lucretius, that " all motion is ever linked 
together and a new motion ever springs from another in a fixed 
order." Each may claim that "his own will makes for each a 
beginning and from this beginning motions are welled through 
the limbs." All that is necessary is the insistence upon breaks 
in the causal nexus; both may agree in this, while one regards 
the causal nexus as composed of a mixture of physical and 
mental phenomena, and the other regards it as composed of 
physical phenomena alone, to which mental phenomena stand in 
a peculiar relation that cannot properly be called causal. The 
former will regard the volition which, according to Lucretius, 
"makes for each a beginning," as the first term in a certain causal 



560 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

series ; the latter will make tlie concomitant braiu-cliange the 
first term in the same series, and shift the volition to a parallel 
line, through a repugnance to materializing mind. Thus each 
will maintain that a given causal series runs out, when we follow 
it back to a certain point ; and the considerations which move 
each to embrace such a doctrine must be the same. They are 
the considerations that moved Lucretius, and have moved men 
ever since. 

It was necessary to say so much at this point, for I wish the 
reader to feel that he may accept the reasonings of this chapter 
without feeling responsible for what is said in the two chapters 
which have preceded. What is here said may be accepted by 
the parallelist, but it may also be accepted by his opponent. We 
are concerned with an independent question, which may be 
answered independently and on its own merits. With this 
preface, I turn to a closer examination of the " free-will " doc- 
trine. 

Here I sit at my desk ; my hand is on the paper before me ; 
can I raise it from the paper or not, just as I please ? To such 
a question as this both the " free-willist " and his opponent, the 
determinist, who denies that there are breaks in the causal nexus, 
must give the same answer. Of course I can raise it or not, as 
I please. Both must admit that I am, in this sense, free to raise 
it or not to raise it. The question that divides them lies a little 
farther back : the determinist must hold that, if I please to raise 
my hand, there is some cause within me, or in my environment, 
or both, that brings about the result ; and if I please not to raise 
it he must believe that there is some cause or complex of causes 
that produce just that result. He does not deny that I can do 
as I please. He merely maintains that my "pleasing" is never 
uncaused^ and inexplicable. On the other hand, the advocate of 
the "liberty of indifference," the " free-willist" — the indeterminist^ 
as he should really be called — maintains that, under precisely the 
same circumstances, internal and external, I may raise my hand 
or keep it at rest. He holds, in other words, that if I move, 

^ I bepf the re.idor to bear in mind what has been said just above. When the 
paralhlistic dotenninist says one's " pleasing " is never uncaused, he means by it that 
the physical basis of the mental phenomenon is absolutely determined by its physi- 
cal antecedents. But it is not necessary for him to teach parallelism when he is 
merely discussing the question whether cause follow cause " from everlasting." 



Fatalism, "Free-will,'' and Determinism 561 

that action is not to be wholly accounted for by anything what- 
ever that has preceded, for under precisely the same circum- 
stances it might not have occurred. It is, hence, a causeless 
action. 

Let us suppose that the " free-willist " is right, and that 
human actions may be causeless. I am, then, endowed with 
" freedom." Is this a fact in which I have good reason to glory ? 
Let us see. 

One must not forget that we are not here concerned with 
freedom in the usual sense of the word, freedom from external 
compulsion. I have used quotation marks above to indicate that 
the word is used in a peculiar and technical sense. When I 
assume that I am endowed with " freedom " it means only that 
my actions cannot wholly be accounted for by anything that has 
preceded them, even by my own character and impulses, inherent 
or acquired. 

Now I have " freely " given a dollar to a blind beggar. The 
act is an act of "free-will" — it is causeless. Who, then, gave 
the dollar ? Not I. The determining cause of the act is not to 
be found in me ; the money was not given because I was a man 
of tender heart, one prone to benevolent impulses, and naturally 
incited by the sight of suffering to make an effort to relieve it. 
Just in so far as the act was the result of " free-will," these things 
could have had nothing to do with the matter. Another man, 
the veriest miser and skin-flint, the most unfeeling brute upon 
the streets, might equally well have been the instrument of the 
benevolent deed. His impulses might all be selfish, and his past 
life a consistent history of sordid greed ; I am a lover of my 
kind ; but what has all this to do with acts of " free-will " ? If 
such acts can spring up only upon a grateful soil, they are not 
" free " but determined. To be really " free " they must not be 
conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort, by the misery 
of the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the passer-by. They 
must drop from a clear sky out of the void, for just in so far as 
they can be accounted for they are not '"free." 

As I contemplate it, my " freedom " begins to take on a mel- 
ancholy aspect. It may manifest itself either in good or in evil 
deeds ; who shall choose which ? Not I. The deeds are uncaused, 
they are not conditioned by my character. And since they are 
uncaused, and have no necessary congruity with my character and 



562 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

impulses, what guarantee have I that the course of my life will 
not exhibit the unhappy spectacle of the reign of mere caprice ? 
For forty years I have lived quietly and in obedience to law. 
I am regarded as a decent citizen, and one who can be counted 
upon not to rob his neighbor, or to wave the red flag of the anar- 
chist. I have grown gradually to be a character of such and such 
a kind ; I am fairly familiar with my impulses and aspirations ; 
I hope to carry out plans extending over a good many years in 
the future. Who shall decide for me what I shall do ? 

Alas, I am "free." This /with whom I have lived in the 
past and with whom I think I have some acquaintance, — this 7, 
the respectable man of settled habits, cannot decide whether I shall 
carry out plans or break them, be consistent or inconsistent, love 
or hate, be virtuous or betake myself to crime. This /with whom 
I am familiar cannot condition the future. But I will make the 
most serious of resolves, bind myself with the holiest of promises ! 
To what end ? How can any resolve be a cause of causeless actions, 
or any promise clip the erratic wing of " free-will " ? Could the 
monster be dealt with in this way, it would not be " free-will." 

In so far as I am " free " the future is a wall of darkness. 
One cannot even say with the Moslem : " What shall be, will 
be ; " for there is no shall about it. What will be has no root 
in what is. It is wholly impossible for me to guess what I will 
" freely " do, and it is hopelessly impossible for me to make any 
provision against " free " acts of the most deplorable description. A 
knowledge of my own character in the past brings with it neither 
hope nor consolation. My "freedom" is just as "free" as that 
of the man who was hanged last week. It is not conditioned b)'* 
my character ; if he could " freely " commit murder, so can I. It 
is true that I never dream of killing a man, and would not do 
it for the world ; the I that I know sickens at the thought. Yet 
to admit that this / can prevent it, is to become a determinist. 
If I am " free," I cannot enter this city of refuge. Is " freedom " 
a thing that can be inherited as a bodily or mental constitution ? 
Can it be repressed by a course of education, or laid in chains 
by lifelong habit ? In so far as any action is "/re^," what I 
have inherited, what I have been, what T am, wliat I have always 
done or striven to do, what I most earnestly wish or resolve to 
do at the present moment — these things can have no more to do 
with its future realization than if they had no existence. 



I 



Fatalism, " Free-ioill,'' and Determinism 563 

If, then, I really am " free," I must face the possibility that I 
may at any moment do anything that any man may " freely "do. 

The possibility is a hideous one ; and the most ardent " free- 
willist" will, when he contemplates it frankly, excuse me for 
hoping that, if I am "free," I am at least not very " free." An 
excess of such " freedom " is indistinguishable from the most 
abject slavery to lawless caprice. 

I cannot, then, count upon myself. Good resolutions cannot 
help me ; I mortify the flesh in vain. And when I reflect upon 
the fact that my fellow-men are " free " too, I despair of bettering 
them by the offer of rewards or the threat of punishment. In so 
far as they are " free," they are absolutely beyond my control and 
their own ; persuasion cannot move them ; hope cannot draw 
them on ; fear of pain cannot hold them back. " Freedom " can- 
not be influenced by anything or it would not be " freedom " — the 
idea of making laws for it, and of attaching to such laws penalties, 
is nothing less than absurd. A child has been guilty of a " free " 
action of a sort commonly regarded as reprehensible. He has 
been caught in the pantry. Shall his mother punish him ? It 
seems foolish to punish him merely because he has done the thing 
he is charged with, for, strictly speaking, he has not done the thing ; 
it cannot be referred to his character ; there was nothing in him 
to account for its appearance, and there was nothing in him that 
could have inhibited the action. The act was a " free " one, i.e. 
it was a cuckoo's Qgg^ found in the same nest with other eggs, but 
not to be attributed to the same source. But shall the child not 
be punished to prevent a recurrence of the deed ? How futile a 
measure ! Can any sensible person believe that a woman can with 
a slipper make such changes in a child's mind or body or both, as 
to determine the occurrence or non-occurrence of acts which are, 
by hypothesis, independent of what is contained in the child and 
in his environment ? As well beat the child to prevent the light- 
ning from striking the steeple in the next street. Only in so far 
as he is not " free " is he a creature to be reasoned with, to be per- 
suaded, to be promised rewards, to be threatened, to be punished. 
Which means that only in so far as he is not " free " is he a ra- 
tional human being, capable of taking a place in the great organ- 
ism of society. In so far as he is " free " he is a monster, beyond 
the reach of all human influences ; and were he very " free " we 
should certainly be compelled to keep him under lock and key. 



564 Other Minds, and ilie Realm of JIuids 

I think I lieiir the '' f ree-willist " object, that he does not pos- 
tulate a great deal of " freedom " but a very little. We know- 
that men do not ordinarily jump from open windows to their own 
detriment ; nor, when they take their seat at the table, do they cut 
their throat with the knife beside their plate. They are withheld 
from such acts by considerations, i.e. their actions are undoubt- 
edly influenced by character and environment. If we assume 
just a little " free-will," we do not render of no avail persuasion 
and punishment. We may persuade and punish so artfully and 
so vigorously as to overcome the erratic influences of " freedom," 
and propel our " free " agent along a path previously determined. 
" Free-will " may help this progress, or may somewhat hinder it ; 
it cannot be counted upon ; but, if the wind happen to be con- 
trary, let us push the harder. 

We are, then, always to use a little more energy than the 
occasion seems to call for ; we are to furnish a surplus which will 
cover the aberrations of " free-will " ; w^e are to deal out forty 
stripes plus one, where, in the absence of " free-will," forty minus 
one would seem a sufficient deterrent from crime. Thus will the 
prudent ferryman, when he discovers that a passenger about to 
step into his boat is a " free-will " creature, whose weight may 
causelessly oscillate between one hundred and two hundred 
pounds, take into consideration the danger of possible shipwreck, 
and make allowance for the worst that "free-will" can do. 

It is, then, possible to maintain that the stirrings of "free- 
will " are too feeble to make of man a wholly irrational and un- 
accountable being ; one may insist that he is endowed with but 
a few grains of irrationality, and is, on the whole, not beyond 
the reach of persuasion, but a thing to be moved by considera- 
tions. To be sure, it sounds odd for a man to keep insisting that 
" freedom " is a very good thing, and yet, in the same breath, to 
keep assuring us that it is a very good thing that we have very 
little of it. There are, however, some good things of which it is 
desirable to have but little ; an excess of good vinegar can spoil 
a salad. Is " freedom " a something desirable in small quantities, 
and to be regretted only when present in excess ? 

I think it lias been made clear in the preceding pages tliat 
even a little " freedom " is undesirable. Just in so far as a man 
is " free," the acts tliat seem to be his are not his ; lie is the sport 
of mere caprice ; his breast is the scat of uncaused and inexplicable 



Fatalism, " Free-ivill,'' and Determinism 565 

explosions, whicli no man can predict, and which set at defiance 
all the forces which make for civilization. Why should a man 
wish to be even a little " free " ? Is it that he may be moral ? 

A very little reflection is sufficient to make it evident that no 
'^ free " act can possibly be a moral act. We have all our lives 
been judging our actions and those of our fellow-men. Some 
of them we approve; some we very strongly disapprove. But 
no man of sense passes judgment upon human actions before he 
has found out something about their setting. We pry into men's 
motives and inquire regarding their intentions. Precisely the 
same act may be good or bad, according to its context. It is not 
a moral act for a savage to save a man alive, if he be spared with 
the intention of fattening and eating him later. 

Now let us suppose that the action under discussion is my 
contribution of a dollar to the hoard of the beggar on the street- 
corner. Is it a moral action? Only the unreflective will under- 
take to answer offhand that it is. I may have given that dollar 
in the hope that one more drinking-bout would finish the beggar, 
and relieve me of his unsesthetic presence when I take my daily 
walk. I may have given it out of pure vanity, and to compel the 
admiration of the pleasing young person who is waiting for the 
tram. On the other hand, I may have given it because I was 
moved by the sight of suffering, and was willing to make a sacri- 
fice for the sake of relieving it. It seems the most natural thing 
in the world to judge that the action is moral or not moral accord- 
ing to the setting in which we find it. 

But what if the act was a " free " one ? What if it was not 
determined by my character and impulses and the peculiar cir- 
cumstances in which I was placed? In this case it cannot be 
accounted for by my desire to be rid of the beggar's presence. 
The impression made upon me by the fair onlooker cannot 
account for it. The sight of the beggar's misery furnishes no 
explanation. We cannot ask why the act was done. It was a 
" free " act. It simply appeared. We must bear in mind that, 
just in so far as an act is " free," it cannot be accounted for by 
any ideas antecedently in my mind, or by my natural tendency 
to selfishness, to vanity, or to generous movements of sympathy. 
It does not indicate in me either benevolence or baseness. It is 
an act without a setting — causeless, purposeless, blind. Is it a 
moral act? Surely we have turned our face resolutely away from 



566 Other Minds, and the Realvi of Minds 

the moral judgments of mankind, when we have committed 
ourselves to the unnatural doctrine that " free " acts are 
moral. 

If so very little can be said for indeterminism, why is it that 
so many good men defend it? The reason is not far to seek; 
they suppose that they are defending human freedom. Lucretius 
felt that nothing short of a causeless origination of motions could 
"break through the decrees of fate," and surely we must all admit 
that a man subject to the decrees of fate is not a free man. It 
does not lie with (Edipus to decide whether he shall or shall not 
kill Laius. The notion that a denial of " free-will " is a denial 
of human freedom and a surrender to fatalism is a widespread 
error, and is quite sufficient to account for the surprising things 
men have said on the subject of the will. 

It is a thousand pities that the doctrine of indeterminism 
should have come to be called the doctrine of "free-will." We 
have all heard much of fate and free-will, and no man with the 
spirit of a man in him thinks, without inward revolt, of the possi- 
bility that his destiny is shaped for him by some irresistible exter- 
nal power in the face of which he is impotent. No normal man 
welcomes the thought that he is not free, and the denial of free- 
will can scarcely fail to meet with his reprobation. We recognize 
freedom as the dearest of our possessions, the guarantee, indeed^ 
of all our possessions. The denial of freedom we associate with 
wrong and oppression, the scourge and the dungeon, the tyranny 
of brute force, the despair of the captive, the sodden degradation 
of the slave. Freedom is the open door to the thousand-fold 
activities which well up within us, and to which we give expres- 
sion with joy. 

But it should never be forgotten that freedom — the freedom 
for which men have died, and which poets have sung — has no 
more to do with indeterminism, with " freedom," than has the 
Dog, a celestial constellation, Avith the terrestrial animal that 
barks. The antithesis of freedom is compulsion^ that hateful 
thing that does violence to our nature and crushes with iron hand 
its activities. We say that a man is under compulsion, when the 
impulses of his own nature are overborne by some external power 
and are prevented from translating themselves into action. When 
I wish to raise my hand from the table, and find it held down by 
another, I am under compulsion. I am free when I can assert 



Fatalism, ^'Free-will,'' and Determinism 567 

myself ; when / can do something ; when the action in question 
can be referred to the idea in my mind. 

Of course, in so far as actions which appear to be mine are 
fated, I am not free. Some external power is responsible for the 
actions in question. But it is equally clear that, in so far as any 
actions which appear to be mine are " free " actions, I am not free 
either. Such actions are not done by me, and cannot be pre- 
vented by me. They make their appearance independently ; I 
am not consulted at all in the matter. 

Thus we see that the fatalist and the " free-willist," cordially 
as they seem to detest each other, are really fighting for the same 
cause. The former is eager to maintain that actions of which I 
appear to be the author are done by some other power. The 
latter strenuously insists that actions of which I appear to be the 
author, are done by no power at all. Both agree in denying my 
causal efficiency ; both reduce me to a passive spectator of what 
appear to he my acts. 

It is clear that the " free-willist " has gone too far. He has 
set me free from another, and, not content with that, he has gone 
on to set me free from myself. He has refused to refer my 
behavior to another ; now he refuses to refer my behavior to me. 
In other words, he has set me, not free, but "free." To withdraw 
me from society he has condemned me to a confinement so solitary 
that I am not even in the cell with myself. 

This is not freedom. To be a free agent, man must at least 
be an agent. Of the three doctrines, fatalism, " free-will," and 
determinism, it is only the last that guarantees man's freedom. It 
holds that man is really an agent — that his acts may be attributed 
to him, that they have their roots in his character as well as in his 
environment. 

Determinism is the doctrine that all the phenomena of nature 
are subject to law ; it is a frank recognition of the order of causes 
as it seems to be revealed to us. The fall of a raindrop, the un- 
folding of a flower, the twitching of an eyelid, the penning of a 
sentence — all these, the determinist maintains, have their ade- 
quate causes, though the causes of such occurrences lie, in great 
part, beyond the line which divides our knowledge from our 
ignorance. Determinism is, of course, a faith; for it is as yet 
impossible for science to demonstrate even that the fluttering of 
an aspen-leaf in the summer breeze is wholly subject to law ; and 



568 Other Minds , and the Realm of Minds 

that every turn or twist upon its stem must be just what it is, and 
nothing else, in view of the whole system of forces in play at the 
moment. Much less is it possible to prove in detail that that 
complicated creature called a man, draws out his chair, sits down 
to dinner, gives his neighbor the best cut of the beef, discusses 
the political situation, and resists the attractions of the decanter 
before him, strictly in accordance with law. No man can prove 
that every motion of every muscle is the effect of antecedent 
causes which are incalculable only because of the limitations of 
our intelligence and our ignorance of existing facts. And yet 
the faith of science seems to those trained in the sciences a reason- 
able thing, for, as is pointed out, it is progressively justified by the 
gradual advance of human knowledge, and even in fields in which 
anything like exact knowledge is at present unattainable, the little 
we do know hints unmistakably at the reign of law. 

Determinism is, then, nothing less than a recognition of the 
order which reigns in the world. It differs from fatalism in that 
it refuses to ignore arbitrarily certain causal sequences to which 
experience appears to give unequivocal testimony. It regards as 
absurd the notion that an end can be determined independently 
of means — that the slaying of Laius has no necessary connection 
with the actions of Laius and of GEdipus. And it dift'ers from 
indeterminism in holding that there is no action which may not 
theoretically be traced to its causes. In recognizing that ideas 
may stand to actions in the relation of plan to accomplishment, 
and that the ideas themselves are not inexplicable appearances, 
without relation to anything that has preceded them, it recog- 
nizes that man has a character and can act freely in harmony with 
his character. It views man as he is viewed by the judge, the 
philanthropist, the moralist, the pedagogue, and the plain man. 

Men generally regard a man as free when he is in a position to 
be influenced by those considerations by which they think the 
normal man not under compulsion naturally is influenced. They 
do not think that he is robbed of his freedom in so far as he has a 
character, weighs motives, seeks information, is influenced by per- 
suasion. What would become of our social system if men had no 
character, and were not affected by influences of this sort ? The 
popular prejudi(;e against determinism must be due to a miscon- 
ception. It is due to tlie misconception that determinism and 
fatalism are the same thing; when, as a matter of fact, deter- 



Fatalism, "Free-will,'' and Determinism 569 

minism is the only doctrine which effectually combats fatalism 
and rescues for us that freedom without which man would not 
be man. 

A determinist cannot, then, be a fatalist. I have said some 
pages back that he may or may not be a parallelist. It ought to 
be evident that he may or may not be a materialist or an idealist, 
a monist or a dualist, a theist, an atheist, or an agnostic. From 
this sheaf of " isms " he must choose on other grounds than his 
determinism. As a determinist he must regard the world as 
an orderly world and recognize cause and effect wherever they 
seem to be revealed. But men may agree upon this point, and 
yet differ widely touching the ultimate nature of this orderly 
world. There is nothing to prevent the determinist from being a 
theologian, and upholding the doctrine of predestination. How- 
ever, he must not be a fatalistic predestinarian ; he must regard 
the Divine plan as embracing means as well as ends ; he must 
make it all-inclusive. If he does this, he can say, with George 
Herbert : — 

" O sacred Providence, Who from end to end 
Strongly and sweetly niovest ! shall I write, 
And not of Thee, through whom my fingers bend 
To hold my quill? shall they not do Thee right? " . . . 

" We all acknowledge both Thy power and love 
To be exact, transcendent, and divine ; 
Who dost so strongly and so sweetly move, 
While all things have their will, yet none but Thine." 



CHAPTER XXXIV 
OF GOD 

I HAVE said in an earlier chapter ^ that there is but one argu- 
ment for the existence of minds, and I have insisted that the 
assumption that minds exist must not be made lightly and with- 
out good reason. 

That men have made and do make a multitude of hasty infer- 
ences of the sort needs no proof. The bright cloud of the 
greater and lesser divinities with which the poetic imagination 
of the Greek peopled heaven and earth could not endure the 
beams of the rising sun, and it dissolved and disappeared. To 
primitive man all things are full of gods in a very literal sense, 
and when primitive man learns to reflect, these gods are banished 
to the realm of mere imaginings. So beautiful are the unreal 
creatures born of the uncritical thought of a gifted race, that one 
feels a pang as one sees them fade away. The sky, the earth, and 
the expanse of ocean seem robbed of the life with which they 
pulsated, and there are moments in which even the modern man 
is tempted to envy the pagan "suckled in a creed outworn." 

Our world, the world which science and the development of 
reflective thought present to our gaze, is, it is true, a something 
much more august than the cosey little world in which the Greek 
found himself so much at home. Of its majesty the ancient 
thinkers had glimpses not vouchsafed to their unthinking 
fellows. But the long labor of the ages has brought us to a 
deeper realization of its greatness and to an abiding sense of the 
littleness of man. We are more conscious of our ignorance than 
were our predecessors, and the very growth of our knowledge has 
forced us to see how far we fall short of the ideal of knowledge 
which we have come to hold before ourselves and which we make 
efforts to attain. In this great world which we see dimly pre- 
sented to us man seems to hold an insignificant place ; it is, per- 

1 Chapter XXVIII. 
570 



Of God 571 

haps, natural that he should sometimes realize this with a shiver, 
and look back regretfully to a world that is dead and gone. 

But what is the world as it is revealed to the modern man ? 
It is still a world of matter and of minds. But the world of 
matter has expanded into a vast mechanism, which we cannot dare 
to limit either in space or in time, and with whose laws we have 
but the beginning of an acquaintance, — a mechanism in compari- 
son with which man's little body, the solid earth upon which he 
stands, the solar system of which it is a part, are as vanishing 
quantities. And the realm of minds which can be indubitably 
proved to exist seems to have shrunk into insignificance, leaving 
the great world bare and desolate. 

Science tells of a time when there was no life upon the earth, 
and predicts a time when life shall have disappeared. Even in 
our little corner of the Universe, the existence of the minds which 
criticism has left us appears to be a passing existence. They 
come, and they are gone, and their place knows them no more. 
Of minds related to organisms in other worlds than ours, we may 
speculate, but we know nothing definite. If there be such, must 
we not assume that they people a world in a given phase of its 
existence, and disappear as minds and organisms will disappear 
on this planet? The world is, then, a world of matter and of 
minds — but the world is great, and the minds seem lost in the 
immensities of time and space. 

Is this the sum of things to the modern man, the heir of the 
ages? There can be, I think, no doubt that the student of the 
sciences who is willing to walk only upon a path illumined by 
the clear light of demonstrative evidence, the man who will accept 
onh^ what is proved as definitely as it can be proved that there is 
hydrogen in the sun or that other men have minds like his own, 
must accept this world in its bareness and in its desolation. 

And yet to the mass of men this is not the sum of things ; the 
world thus viewed is a world robbed of its soul, a world dead and 
meaningless, and not the living reality in whose presence they 
feel themselves to be. They cannot escape the conviction that 
the world reveals, not merely minds, those little minds whose 
existence and whose nature it seems possible to determine in the 
light of what will generally be accepted as scientific evidence, but 
also Mind, a something immeasurably greater than any or all of 
these. In other words, they believe in God ; and it is of this 



572 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

belief — a belief so venerable and one that has played so impor- 
tant a part in the evolution of humanity that it cannot be treated 
lightly by any thoughtful man — that I purpose to speak in this 
chapter. 

It is no part of the duty of the metaphysician to prove the 
existence of God, as it is no part of his duty to prove the exist- 
ence of any given finite mind. But just as it clearly is his duty 
to make evident what we mean when we speak of a mind, how Ave 
are to conceive of minds as related to matter, and the nature of 
the inference by which we establish the existence of minds ; so it 
is his duty to show what we may legitimately mean when we 
speak of God, how we are to conceive of God as related to the 
world, and the nature of the inference on which a belief in God 
may find its foundation. To be sure, one may believe very firmly 
in the existence of other men's minds, and one may be penetrated 
with the conviction that God exists, without ever having attained 
to any clear ideas at all upon the points above mentioned. In 
each case one may be in the possession of truth. But a truth 
dimly grasped is always a truth more or less in danger of admix- 
ture with error, and from such error the analyses of the meta- 
physician may help to free one. They are not without their uses. 

Of all the arguments which have been advanced for the exist- 
ence of God there is but one that can be said to have really 
influenced men's minds, and that is the Argument from Design. 
It maintains that we find in the world evidences of a Mind that 
is not to be confused with the minds referred to particular organ- 
isms. It appeals to the plain man quite as strongly as it lias 
appealed to the philosopher and to the theologian ; it seems to 
hira simple, unambiguous, and in harmony with the dictates of 
common sense. Even when he is not wholly content to accept 
its conclusion, it appears to him an argument which a sensible 
man need not be ashamed to bring forward. Of this argument I 
shall speak at some length after a while ; but first I must say 
something of proofs of a different sort. 

As the student of the history of speculative thought well 
knows, there is quite a collection of such. They have seemed 
satisfactory to those who discovered them, and perhaps to a few 
of their disciples. To the mass of mankind they mean nothing at 
all. This is not the place to enter into a detailed criticism of 
theistic arguments, for the discussion would have to be a long 



Of God 573 

one ; but I may be permitted to illustrate what an argument for 
God should not be by a reference to arguments of this kind. 

For convenience I shall divide them into two classes : those 
which make God a mind, but prove His existence in a way in 
which it is not sensible to try to prove the existence of any mind ; 
and those which make God something else than a mind, and 
which, hence, cannot properly be called theistic arguments, what- 
ever they may or may not prove. 

For a good illustration of arguments of the first class I turn to 
Bishop Berkeley. The objects perceived by the senses can have 
no existence, he maintains, except in a mind. Our perceptions of 
such objects are intermittent — there is no sensible thing of which 
we are continuously conscious. Yet the objects of sense must 
have a continuous existence, for it is absurd to maintain that the 
world is at every instant annihilated and created anew. The 
world must, then, exist continuously, and, since it does not exist 
continuously in any finite mind, there must exist a divine Mind 
in which it has its being : " As sure, therefore, as the sensible 
world really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent Spirit 
who contains and supports it." 

The error at the root of this argument I have indicated in 
Chapter VII. Berkeley has confounded things with the percep- 
tion of things in this mind or in that. He has turned the divine 
Mind into a cupboard for the storing of unused percepts. Had 
he held on to an external world, as he should have done, and had he 
realized what it means for a thing to exist in the external world, 
he would not have had the shadow of a foundation for this fantas- 
tic argument. It impresses as untrustworthy even those who do 
not see clearly just where he has gone wrong. It is not self-evi- 
dent that percepts must exist continuously ; we have no evidence 
that percepts are transferred from mind to mind as chairs may be 
carried from one room to another ; it never occurs to us to try to 
prove the existence of any finite mind on no better ground than 
the loss of percepts from our own. The argument is emphatically 
an argument for the philosopher, and for the philosopher who is 
already convinced of the truth of the conclusion and cares little 
to scrutinize the premises. 

The fides quaerens intellectum^ the faith that already has its 
conclusion, and is casting about for premises, is always in some 
danger of accepting premises uncritically. We must not be too 



674 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

severe upon Berkeley, for this lovable soul was misled by a 
weakness which belongs to our common human nature. And we 
must not be too severe upon Anselm and Descartes for the medise- 
val subtlety which would, as it has happily been expressed, coerce 
God into existence by sheer force of definition. 

"We believe," cries Anselm,^ "that Thou art a being than 
which nothing greater can be thought. Is there, then, no such 
nature, because the fool has said in his heart : There is no God ? 
But surely the fool himself, when he hears me speak of a being 
than which nothing greater can be thought, understands what he 
hears, and what he understands is in his mind, although he does 
not understand that the being exists. For it is one thing to have 
an idea of an object ; another, to know that the object exists. 
When a painter thinks of a picture which he is about to paint, he 
has the picture in his mind ; but he knows that it does not yet 
exist, because he has not painted it. But when he has painted it, 
he both has it in his mind and knows that it exists, for he has 
painted it. Hence even the fool may be convinced that there 
exists, at least in his mind, something than which nothing greater 
can be thought. When he hears this mentioned, he understands 
it, and what he understands is in his mind. But that, than which 
nothing greater can be thought, cannot exist only in the mind ; 
for if it exists only in the mind, something can be thought as 
existing both in the mind and in reality, and this is greater. If, 
therefore, that than which nothing greater can be thought, exists 
only in the mind, then that, than which nothing greater can be 
thought, is that, than which something greater can be thought ; but 
surely this cannot be. Hence there exists, without doubt, some- 
thing than which nothing greater can be thought, and this exists 
both in the mind and in reality." 

" Now if," writes Descartes,^ " from the mere fact that I can 
draw from my thought the idea of an object, it follows that every- 
thing I clearly and distinctly apprehend to belong to that object 
really does belong to it, may I not draw from this an argument 
and a demonstrative proof of the existence of God ? It is as 
certain that I find in myself the idea of Him, i.e. the idea of a 
supremely perfect being, as that I find in myself the idea of any 
figure or number. And I know just as clearly and distinctly that 
an actual and eternal existence belongs to His nature, as I know 
1 " Proslogion," II. ^ "• M6ditation ciuquifeme." 



I 



Of God 675 

that everything I can demonstrate of a given figure or number 
really belongs to the nature of that figure or number. Hence, 
even if the conclusions arrived at in the preceding * Meditations ' 
should be found to be false, I ought to regard the existence of 
God as being at least as certain as I have heretofore believed the 
mathematical truths to be which are concerned only with numbers 
and figures ; though, in truth, this may not appear quite clear at 
first sight, but may seem somewhat sophistic. For, being accus- 
tomed to distinguish in all other things existence from essence, 
I easily persuade myself that God's existence can be separated 
from His essence, and that, hence, one can conceive God as not 
actually existing. Nevertheless, when I give closer attention to 
the matter, I find that God's existence can no more be separated 
from His essence, than from the essence of a rectilinear triangle 
can be separated the equality of the sum of its three angles to two 
right angles, or from the idea of a mountain the idea of a valley. 
Thus it is no less absurd to conceive of a God, i,e. of a supremely 
perfect Being, that lacks existence, i.e, that lacks some perfection, 
than it is to conceive of a mountain without a valley." 

It is not worth while to analyze these arguments at length. 
They have long been dead. The reader has probably observed 
that they rest in part upon a misapprehension of the meaning of 
the words "real existence." Real existence is not a constituent 
property or attribute of a thing — a something which, when added 
to the other attributes, completes the thing, and, when abstracted, 
leaves the thing defective. What we can mean by real existence 
has been indicated earlier in this volume, and it is very clear that 
it is not a something which we may extract from a mere idea by 
the aid of an analysis. The verdict of the world touching such 
arguments as the above does not widely differ from that attributed 
to Gerson, the famous chancellor of the University of Paris : " I 
do not know which is the bigger fool, he who admits this conclu- 
sion, or he who says in his heart : There is no God." ^ 

From such arguments as these, I pass to those of the second 
class mentioned above — those which make God something else 
than a Mind, and which, hence, cannot properly be regarded as 
theistic arguments at all. It would be absurd to maintain that 
their authors have not, in many instances at least, intended them 
as theistic arguments, or that they have realized that the object of 
iDe Vorges, " Saint Anselme," Paris, 1901, p. 289. 



576 Other' Minds , and the liealm of Minds 

their proof is not what men commonly mean by God. Men who 
advance such proofs may be devout theists, and may be under the 
impression that they are establishing the existence of God, when 
they are actually doing quite another thing. My meaning will 
best be made plain by a few illustrations, and to these I turn 
without further preamble. 

It is, argued Augustine, by depending upon the evidence of 
the senses that one comes to infer the existence of other men's 
minds. Each mind perceives itself immediately ; it perceives by 
sense the bodies of other men, and infers from their movements 
that they enclose a mind similar to itself. It must, however, 
believe in such minds : it cannot know them as it knows itself. 

Our mind has, nevertheless, immediate and certain knowledge 
beyond its knowledge of itself. When a man tells us some fact 
concerning his own mind, we believe it ; when he enunciates some 
general truth, we recognize and approve it. The individual voli- 
tions, etc., in each person, but that one person can immediately 
perceive ; the truth enunciated is common to all ; we can all gaze 
upon it with the eye of the mind. It is an " intelligible " thing, 
and exists in an unchangeable eternity. Thus we perceive truth, 
beauty, righteousness, which exist as eternal "forms." 

Now, nothing is true, unless it partakes of truth ; but God is 
the Truth per se. And nothing is good except as it partakes of 
goodness ; but the good of goods, by which all things are good, is 
God. If one could put aside those things which are good by the 
participation of the good, and could discern that good by the par- 
ticipation of which they are good, one would discern God. He 
who loves his brother, loves God, who is love, and is more cer- 
tainly known than his brother — " known more, because more 
present ; known more, because more within him."^ 

To one unfamiliar with the history of philosophy this argu- 
ment must seem strange and unnatural in the extreme. But to 
one who is at all acquainted with the course of speculative thought 
among the ancients and in the Middle Ages every turn of expres- 
sion must sound familiar. Augustine introduces us to the Platonic 
Realism, which turned universals^ class notions, abstractions, into 
realities, eternal, unchangeable, and higher in their nature than 
the individual things which may be subsumed under them. To 

1 "De Trinitate," VIII, 12. See also " De Civ. Dei," VIII, 0, 9; "Solil.," 
I, 27 ; " De Triu.," VIII, 3, 4, 6, 9, and XIV, 21. 



Of God 'oil 

one who looks at things in this way, the truth, beauty and goodness 
which may be discerned in what is true, beautiful, and good are 
no longer abstractions; they are independent of the objects which, 
in Platonic phrase, "participate" in them. What more natural 
than to believe that the contemplation of these eternal realities 
is nothing else than the contemplation of the attributes of God ? 
Thus, he who knows any truth, knows Truth ; he who knows any- 
thing good, knows Goodness ; he who loves his brother, knows his 
own love, and, hence, knows Love. In knowing these he knows 
God ; and he knows Him more immediately than he can know 
any finite mind except his own. 

It is scarcely necessary to point out to the modern reader that 
this is in no sense an argument for God. The God who is thus 
" discerned " is, after all, but a group of abstract notions, and is 
not in the least a mind distinct from the mind of man and revealed 
by the system of things. That it is not known as, in general, 
other minds are known, Augustine has himself indicated. So 
foreign is the whole argument to our present ways of thinking, 
that it may occasion some surprise that I should here devote space 
to it ; but the realistic tendency to turn abstractions into things 
has had such an immense influence upon philosophic thought in 
the past, and has shown itself in the writings of men in other 
respects so different from one another, that it seems wrong to 
make no reference to it, when one is treating even briefly the 
arguments for God which men have deemed it worth while to 
bring forward. 

One would think it well-nigh impossible to find a bed broad 
enough to contain three men so different as St. Anselm, Giordano 
Bruno, and Spinoza. Yet all three found it possible to attain their 
chosen ends by the conversion of universals — class-notions — into 
individual things. " He," writes Anselm, " who cannot under- 
stand how several men are specifically one man, is also incapable 
of understanding how several persons, each of whom is God, are 
one God."i The rhapsodies of Bruno must remain wholly unin- 
telligible to one who does not see that the First Absolute Principle 
of which he speaks is a universal, an abstraction, obtained by 
allowing the differences which distinguish individual things to 
drop out of view. 2 The Spinozistic God or Substance, in which, 

i"Defide Trinitatis," 2. 

2 "Delia Causa, Principio ed Uno : " Dialogo Terzo; ed. TVagner, pp. 261-264. 



678 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

in the pages of the " Ethics," all things seem to live and move and 
have their being, turns out on examination to be logically nothing 
more than a name for thought and extension in the abstract.^ 

It has gone out of fashion to demonstrate the existence of God 
by identifying Him with a group of universals ; but it has not 
gone out of fashion to offer demonstrations of God's existence. I 
shall briefly set forth two that have been brought forward in our 
own time, and are being more or less discussed by our contempo- 
raries. The reader will see, I hope, that they are defective in 
somewhat the same way as the argument of Augustine is defective 
— it is only by a confusion that the object with which they con- 
cern themselves can be regarded as God at all. 

1 pass over Mr. Spencer's attempt to establish the existence of 
an Absolute which it is clear that he regards as a quasi-deity, and 
for which he harbors emotions of awe and veneration. Both the 
argument and its object have been examined in Chapter XXVI, 
and it was there pointed out that the argument is a non sequitur 
and that its object is simply nothing at all. The Unknowable we 
may leave out of account. I shall begin with the argument for 
the Absolute, by which is meant the Deity ,2 presented us by Mr. 
Bradley in his work entitled " Appearance and Reality." In out- 
line it is as follows : — 

All those aspects of our experience which we are accustomed 
to regard as indubitable and real — qualities of things, the rela- 
tions between such, things themselves, space, time, motion and 
change, causation, activity, the self — turn out on critical exami- 
nation to be self-contradictory and absurd. They cannot, hence, 
be real ; they must be something unreal, mere appearance.^ 

We must, however, keep fast hold upon this, that appearances 
exist. It is nonsense to deny this. And whatever exists must 
belong to reality.* 

Now, when we criticise anything as untrue, as unreal, we 
evidently apply a criterion of reality. Thus, in rejecting the 
inconsistent, as appearance, we are applying a positive knowledge 
of the ultimate nature of things. Our test is self -consistency. 
Reality must be self-consistent. And as appearance must belong 
to reality, it must be concordant and other than it seems. The 

' I have discussed this at length elsewhere ; see "The Philosophy of Spinoza," 
New York, 1894, and "On Spinozistic Immortality," Philadelphia, 1809. 

2 See the Introduction. » Chapters 1 to XII. * pp. 131-132, ed. 1897. 



1 



Of God 579 

bewildering mass of phenomenal diversity must, hence, somehow 
be at unity and self -consistent ; for it cannot be elsewhere than 
in reality, and reality excludes discord. This amounts to saying 
that the real is individual ; it is one.^ 

Our result so far is this : "Everything phenomenal is some- 
how real ; and the absolute must at least be as rich as the relative. 
And, further, the Absolute is not many ; there are no independent 
reals. The universe is one in this sense that its differences exist 
harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing. 
Hence the Absolute is, so far, an individual and a system, but, if 
we stop here, it remains but formal and abstract. Can we then, 
the question is, say anything about the concrete nature of the 
system ? 

" Certainly, I think, this is possible. When we ask as to the 
matter which fills up the empty outline, we can reply in one word, 
that this matter is experience. And experience means something 
much the same as given and present fact. We perceive, on reflec- 
tion, that to be real, or even barely to exist, must be to fall within 
sentience. Sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is 
not this is not real. We may say, in other words, that there is no 
being or fact outside of that which is commonly called psychical 
existence. Feeling, thought, and volition (any groups under 
which we class psychical phenomena) are all the material of 
existence, and there is no other material actual or even 
possible. "2 

Thus, " the Absolute is one system, and its contents are noth- 
ing but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all- 
inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in 
concord. For it cannot be less than appearance, and hence no 
feeling or thought of any kind can fall outside its limits. And 
if it is more than any feeling and thought which we know, it 
must still remain more of the same nature. It cannot pass into 
another region beyond what falls under the general head of 
sentience."^ 

But what are we to understand this Absolute, this one 
system, as including ? Mr. Bradley's answer to this question 
is so significant that I must quote it at length. 

" Can the Absolute be said to consist and to be made up of 
souls ? The question is ambiguous, and must be discussed in sev- 
1 Chapter XIII. 2 p. 144. 8 pp. 146-147. 



580 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

eral senses. Is there — let us ask first — in the universe any sort 
of matter not contained in finite centres of experience ? It seems 
at first sight natural to point at once to the relations between 
these centres. But such relations, we find on reflection, have 
been, so far, included in the perception and thought of the centres 
themselves. And what the question comes to is, rather, this. Can 
there be matter of experience, in any form, which does not enter 
as an element into some finite centre ? 

" In view of our ignorance this question may seem unanswer- 
able. We do not know why or how the Absolute divides itself 
into centres, or the way in which, so divided, it still remains one. 
The relation of the many experiences to the single experience, and 
so to one another, is, in the end, beyond us. And, if so, why 
should there not be elements experienced in the total, and yet not 
experienced within any subordinate focus ? We may, indeed, from 
the other side, confront this ignorance and this question with a 
doubt. Has such an unattachment element, or margin of ele- 
ments, any meaning at all ? Have we any right to entertain such 
an idea as rational ? Does not our ignorance in fact forbid us to 
assume the possibility of any matter experienced apart from a 
finite whole of feeling ? But, after consideration, I do not find 
that this doubt should prevail. Certainly it is only by an abstrac- 
tion that I can form the idea of such unattached elements, and 
this abstraction, it may seem, is not legitimate. And, if the ele- 
ments were taken as quite loose, if they were not still inseparable 
factors in a whole of experience, then the abstraction clearly would 
lead to an inconsistent idea. And such an idea, we have agreed, 
must not be regarded as possible. But, in the present case, the ele- 
ments, unattached to any finite centre, are still subordinate to and 
integral aspects of the Whole. And, since this Whole is one ex- 
perience, the position is altered. The abstraction from a finite 
centre does not lead visibly to self-contradiction. And hence I 
cannot refuse to regard its result as possible. 

" But this possibility, on the other side, seems to have no im- 
portance. If we take it to be fact, we shall not find that it makes 
much difference to the Whole. And, again, for so taking it there 
appears to be almost no ground. Let us briefly consider these 
two points. That elements of experience should be unattached 
would (we saw) be a serious matter, if they were unattached alto- 
gether and absolutely. But since in any case all comes together 



1 



Of God 581 

and is fused in the Whole, and since this Whole in any case is a 
single experience, the main result appears to me to be quite un- 
affected. The fact that some experience-matter does not directly 
qualify any finite centre is a fact from which I can draw no further 
conclusion. But for holding this fact, in the second place, there 
is surely no good reason. The number of finite centres and their 
diversity is (we know) very great, and we may fairly suppose it to 
extend much beyond our knowledge. Nor do the relations, which 
are 'between ' these centres, occasion difficulty. Relations of course 
cannot fall somewhere outside of reality ; and, if they really were 
'• between ' the centres, we should have to assume some matter of ex- 
perience external and additional to these. The conclusion would fol- 
low ; and we have seen that, rightly understood, it is possible. But, 
as things are, it seems no less gratuitous. There is nothing, so far 
as I see, to suggest that any aspect of any relation lies outside the 
experience-matter contained in finite centres. The relations, as 
such, do not and cannot exist in the Absolute. And the question 
is whether that higher experience, which contains and transforms 
the relations, demands any element not experienced somehow 
within the centres. For assuming such an element I can myself 
perceive no ground. And since, even if we assume this, the main 
result seems to remain unaltered, the best course is, perhaps, to 
discard it as unreal. It is better, on the whole, to conclude that 
no element of Reality falls outside the experience of finite centres. 

" Are we then to assert that the Absolute consists of souls ? 
That, in my opinion, for two reasons would be incorrect. A 
centre of experience, first, is not the same thing as either a soul 
or, again, a self. It need not contain the distinction of not-self 
from self ; and, whether it contains that or not, in neither case is 
it properly a self. It will be either below, or else wider than and 
above, the distinction. And a soul, as we have seen, is always the 
creature of an intellectual construction. It cannot be the same 
thing with a mere centre of immediate experience. Nor again can 
we affirm that every centre implies and entails in some sense a 
corresponding soul. For the duration of such centres may per- 
haps be so momentary, that no one, except to save a theory, could 
call them souls. Hence we cannot maintain that souls contain 
all the matter of experience which fills the world. 

" And in any case, secondly, the Absolute would not consist 
of souls. Such a phrase implies a mode of union which we can- 



582 titer Minds, and the Realm of 2Iuids 

not regard as ultimate. It suggests that in the Absolute finite 
centres are maintained and respected, and that we may consider 
them, as such, to persist and to be merely ordered and arranged. 
But not like tliis (we have seen) is the final destiny and last 
truth of things. We have a rearrangement not merely of things 
but of their internal elements. We have an all-pervasive trans- 
fusion with a reblending of all material. And we can hardly 
say that the Absolute consists of finite things, when the things, 
as such, are there transmuted and have lost their individual 
natures."^ 

I must frankly confess that Mr. Bradley's argument appears 
to me so loose in its texture and so vague in its conclusion that 
I cannot but marvel that it has seemed to any one a satisfactory 
argument for God. All those things that Mr. Bradley has set 
aside as mere appearance — space, time, motion, causality, activity, 
and the rest — seem, I think, self-contradictory only to one who 
has made a half-analysis of them, and has fallen into the usual 
confusions of those who make half -analyses. And what shall we 
make of the statement that these things, although they are not 
real, exist P Have they real existence ? No, their existence must 
be merely apparent existence. But what is apparent existence ? 
What is the difference between it and real existence ? Surely it 
is desirable that we be treated to a clear analysis of both of these 
conceptions before they be allowed to play their part in the 
argument laid before us. And how understand the assertion that 
appearance must belong to reality ? As it stands it is vagueness 
itself. We shall see whether it becomes any less vague in the 
sequel. 

" Reality," says Mr. Bradley, " must be self-consistent. And 
as appearance must belong to reality, it must be concordant and 
other than it seems." Is this a roundabout way of saying that 
appearance is reality? If appearance belongs to reality in some 
loose sense of the word, why may not reality be consistent and 
appearance remain inconsistent ? And how can an appearance be 
" other than it seems " ? When we have gotten to tlie other^ are 
we still dealing with the appearance ? And is it possible to be 
" in reality " without being real ? 

As the reader must see, Mr. Bradley's argument moves in a 
cloud of vague and unanalyzed conceptions which it is the first 

1 pp. 520-529. 



I 



Of God 58a 

duty of the metaphysician to dissect. But I must not loiter, 
Mr. Bradley arrives at the conclusion that Reality, the Absolute, 
is one system to which every appearance "somehow" belongs. 
Having gotten so far, he falls into the idealistic blunder of 
rejecting the only thing which makes it possible for us to have 
a universe, a cosmos, a system of things at all — he denies the 
existence of an external world : " there is no being or fact out- 
side of that which is commonly called psychical existence." 

I have discussed this blunder at such length in previous 
chapters, that it would be unpardonable for me to dwell upon 
it here. But the reader will remember that, to one who holds 
firmly to an external world, and who realizes what is meant by 
psychical existence as distinguished from physical, it is not un- 
meaning to speak of a system of things. To him there are external 
things and there are minds ; the external things form a system, 
and the minds are related to bodies in that system, and thus to 
each other, in certain definite ways which can with some clear- 
ness be indicated. There is no phenomenon which may not (theo- 
retically) be assigned its place in that system. It is a system 
which seems to be recognized by science and common sense. 

Of such a system Mr. Bradley's denial of an external world 
deprives him. He seems to have nothing left on his hands save 
a plurality of minds, " centres of experience," which must be held 
together by a "somehow." He cannot even call upon Berkeley's 
God to bring order out of this chaos, for he does not believe in 
Berkeley's God. Reality, the Absolute, contains nothing that 
does not fall within the experience of finite centres ; in other 
words, there is nothing in the Absolute which is not in finite 
minds. 

To the plain man such a statement as this can only mean that 
the Absolute consists of the total contents of finite minds, taking 
this word in its broadest sense. But Mr. Bradley objects to the 
use of the word " consist" in this connection. The contents of finite 
minds must undergo " an all-pervasive transfusion with a reblend- 
ing of all material " before we have the Absolute ; and under this 
treatment finite things must be " transmuted " and must " lose their 
individual natures." 

Now, I beg the reader to ask himself seriously whether, when 
we have denied the existence of an external world ; when we 
have refused to admit the existence of anything outside of a 



584 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

number of finite minds apparently wholly disconnected with each 
other ; when we have " transmuted " the contents of such minds 
until they have '' lost their individual natures " ; when, that is, 
we have so altered qualities of things, relations, space, time, 
causality, motion, change, activity, the self, that in the end no 
one of them is, in Pyrrhonic phrase, " any more this than that " ; 
— I beg the reader to ask himself seriously whether, when we 
have done all this, we may conclude that we have been moving 
in the direction of anything that the broadest charity can dignify 
by the name of a " system," a universe, an order of things ? 

And I also beg the reader to ask himself, whether the result- 
ing confusion, the " all-pervasive transfusion " of the contents of 
finite minds, is what men mean, and what in the past centuries 
they have meant, by the word " God " ? 

To be sure, men have used the word in many senses, — it has 
not meant precisely the same thing to the rustic and to the scholar, 
to the mediaeval monk and to the modern man of science, to the 
Jew, to the Moslem, and to the Christian. Nevertheless, the 
fluctuations in the meaning of the word have not been, as a rule, 
lawless and limitless. Men generally have conceived God to be a 
Mind revealed in the world, and they have conceived of that Mind 
after the analogy of the human mind — sometimes with many 
apologies for having done so. 

Wlien a thinker has, advertently or inadvertently, quite aban- 
doned this thought, and when it has become clear to others that 
he has abandoned it, he has failed to carry men with him. They 
have recognized that he has not brought them a fuller revelation 
of the Deity which they ignorantly worship, but has placed before 
them a Pseudo-God, a something that can only by a confusion be 
identified with the Being that men have called God, and which 
they have conceived to be a Mind. Whether it has been a group 
of universals, or the empty Plotinic " One," or the something to 
which John Scotus on the one hand denied being and which he 
on the other affirmed to be " truth, goodness, essence, light, jus- 
tice, sun, star, air, water, lion, town, worm, and countless otlier 
things " among which are included drunkenness, foolisliness, and 
madness ; whether it has been the object of the negative theology 
of Meister Eckhart, or the Absolute of Mansel and Spencer ; it 
has not been accepted as God ; and, I think, with entire justice. 

Most thoughtful persons who believe in God are ready to 



Of God 585 

admit that their knowledge of Him is very imperfect ; at the 
same time, their thought, when they use the word, is at least 
sufficiently definite to enable them to say with some decision that 
there are certain things that it does not mean to them, and that it 
has not meant to those who have preceded them. They observe 
with a certain wonder that those who bring forward such concep- 
tions of God retain the religious emotions that have sprung from 
and that seem appropriate to a conception of a very different 
kind. They can only explain the fact by supposing, either that 
such writers have been unduly influenced by the associations that 
hover about certain words, or that they really admit into their 
conception elements that a strict logical consistency would 
exclude from it. 

I now turn to an examination of the demonstration of God's 
existence offered us by Professor Royce. It is my last illustration. 

We men, says Professor Royce, as we have wrought upon the 
data of our senses, have gradually woven a vast web of what we 
call relatively connected, united, or organized knowledge. This 
organized knowledge has a curious relation to our more direct 
experience. Whenever it is best developed, we find it under- 
taking to deal with a world of truth, of so-called reality, or at 
least of apparent truth and reality, which is very remote from the 
actual sensory data that any man of us has ever beheld. Our 
organized science deals very largely with conceived — with ideal 
— realities that transcend actual human observation. Atoms, 
ether- waves, geological periods, processes of evolution, — these are 
to-day some of the most important constituents of our conceived 
phenomenal universe.^ 

This realm would be a mere world of fantastic shadows if we 
had not good reason to say these ideas, these laws, these prin- 
ciples, these ideal objects of science, remote as they seem from 
our momentary sensory experiences, still have a real, and in the 
end, a verifiable relation to actual experience. We use the 
scientific conceptions because we can verify their reality. And 
to verify must mean to confirm in sensory terms. To be sure, 
such verification has to be for us men an extremely indirect one.^ 

But our direct experience, as it actually comes, is but a heap 
of fragments. When we say that science reduces our experience 
to order, we are still talking in relatively ideal terms. Science 
1 " The Conception of God," New York, 1902, p. 23. 2 p, 24. 



586 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

does not succeed in reducing the chaos of our finite sensory life 
to any directly presented orderly wholeness. ^ 

Thus, " all our actual sensory experience comes in passing 
moments, and is fragmentary. Our science, wherever it has 
taken any form, contrasts with this immediate fragmentariness of 
our experience the assertion of a world of phenomenal truth, 
which is first of all characterized by the fact that for us it is a 
conceptual world, and not a world directly experienced by any 
one of us. Yet this ideal world is not an arbitrary world. It is 
linked to our actual experience by the fact that its conceptions 
are accounts, as exact as may be, of systems of possible experience, 
whose contents would be presented, in a certain form and order, 
to beings whom we conceive as including our fragmentary mo- 
ments in some sort of definite unity of experience. That these 
scientific accounts of this world of organized experience are true, 
at least in a measure, we are said to verify in so far as, first, we 
predict that, if they are true, certain other fragmentary phenom- 
ena will get presented to us under certain definable conditions, 
and in so far as, secondly, we successfully proceed to fulfil such 
predictions. Thus all of our knowledge of natural truth depends 
upon contrasting our actually fragmentary and stubbornly chaotic 
individual and momentary experience with a conceived world 
of organized experience, inclusive of all our fragments, but 
reduced in its wholeness to some sort of all-embracing unity. 
The contents and objects of this unified experience, we discover 
first by means of hypotheses as to what these contents and objects 
are, and then by means of verifications which depend upon a suc- 
cessful retranslation of our hypotheses as to organized experience 
into terms which our fragmentary experience can, under certain 
conditions, once more fulfil." 2 

We are now in a position to understand what we mean by 
human ignorance. It is the contrast of our supposed indirect 
knowledge of the contents of the ideal organized experience de- 
scribed above with our direct and actual, but fragmentary, passing 
experience, that enables us to confess our ignorance. We accuse our 
direct experience of illusory fragmentariness, because we contrast 
the contents of our individual experience, not witii any mere reality 
apart from any possible experience, but with the conceived object 
of an ideal organized experience, — an object conceived to be pres- 

1 p. 25. 2 pp. 27-28. 



Of God 587 

ent to that experience as directly as our sensory experiences are 
present to us.^ 

Is there any such real unity of organized experience? The 
question " is precisely equivalent to the question : Is there, not 
as a mere possibility, but as a genuine truth, any reality? The 
question : Is there an absolutely organized experience ? is equiva- 
lent to the question : Is there an absolute reality ? You cannot 
first say : There is a reality now unknown to us mortals, and then 
go on to ask whether there is an experience to which such reality 
is presented. The terms ' reality ' and ' organized experience ' 
are correlative terms. The one can only be defined as the object, 
the content, of the other. Drop either, and the other vanishes. 
Make one a bare ideal, and the other becomes equally such. If 
the organized experience is a bare and ideal possibility, then the 
reality is a mere seeming. If what I ought to experience, and 
should experience were I not ignorant, remains only a possibility, 
then there is no absolute reality, but only possibility, in the uni- 
verse, apart from your passing feelings and mine. Our actual 
issue, then, is : Does a real world ultimately exist at all ? If it 
does, then it exists as the object of some sort of concretely actual 
organized experience, of the general type which our science indi- 
rectly and ideally defines, only of this type carried to its absolute 
limit of completeness." 2 

Now, what is the proof of the reality of such an absolute expe- 
rience ? Let us grant, for the moment, that there is no universal 
experience as a concrete fact, but only the finite experience, with 
its hope and endeavor to win it, with its error. What will this 
mean ? The fragmentariness and error of this finite experience 
will be a fact, a truth, a reality, and, as such, just the absolute truth. 
But this absolute truth will exist for whose experience ? For the 
finite experience ? No, for although our finite experience knows 
itself to be limited, still, just in so far as it is finite, it cannot know 
that there is no unity beyond its fragmentariness. If, then, there 
is no universal experience, this truth will be a truth nowhere pre- 
sented — a truth for nobody : " to assert a truth as more than 
possible is to assert the concrete reality of an experience that knows 
this truth." Hence, there must be an absolute experience; the very 
effort to assert that the whole of experience is a world of fragmen- 
tary and finite experience is an effort involving a contradiction.^ 
1 pp. 28-30. 2 pp. 35_33. 3 pp. 39_4i. 



588 Other Mhids, and the Realm of Minds 

I cannot but think that the above argument rests upon certain 
confusions which arise out of an insuthcient analysis of concep- 
tions. To criticise it in full would compel me to repeat what I 
have said in previous chapters toucliing the nature of the external 
world, the meaning of the verb " to exist " as applied to material 
things, the distinction between the world and minds which are 
supposed to know the world, and the nature of the argument by 
which we establish the existence of other minds than our own. I 
must not, of course, do this ; but I can at least indicate what seem 
to me the weak points in the argument, and leave my reader to 
supplement my criticism by a reference to the analyses that I have 
made before. 

The argument begins by drawing the distinction between the 
sensory experience of the individual and the world of phenomenal 
truth to which science testifies. Here we have a contrast between 
the subjective order of phenomena and the objective order — 
between the mind and the external world. 

It is important that he who draws this distinction should rec- 
ognize clearly all that it implies. He should keep himself mind- 
ful of the fact that, when we occupy ourselves with the phenomena 
of the objective order, we should be careful to divest them of that 
subjective reference that marks the phenomena of the subjective 
order. He should remember that nothing that can legitimately 
be conceived to belong to the external world can justly be called 
a sensation, a percept, or a mental phenomenon of any description. 
These words have a definite meaning of their own which may not 
be disregarded — it is absurd to speak of a sensation as on a shelf, 
or of a percept as under a table. 

Again. The argument notes the fact that the world of phe- 
nomenal truth to which science testifies is, /or ?/s, largely a concep- 
tual world, i.e. the enormous complex of individual phenomena 
of which we conceive it to be made up is not known intuitively 
but known largely through representative symbols. 

The remark is a just one. The objective order of phenomena 
is not to be confounded with a symbolic representiition of that 
order in any mind, i.e. with certain phenomena in the subjective 
order. At the same time, it ought also to be borne in mind, that, 
if any mind could contain such a fulness of sensational experi- 
ences that knowing by means of symbols became unnecessary, 
such a fulness that the objective order could be directly mirrored 



Of God 589 

in the subjective, the contents of such a mind would by no means 
be identical with the external world. We should have, not the 
external world, but a complete intuitive knowledge of the external 
world. What is the difference between them ? The difference is 
that, in the one case, we are talking of sensational experiences of a 
mind, and, in the other case, such subjective reference has been 
stripped away. We have no right to use the word "sensation" 
or the word "mind," without due regard to the significance that 
properly attaches to such words. 

Now, we conceive the external world to be an immense com- 
plex of individual phenomena. Our mind contains a very inade- 
quate representation of such a complex. Does the complex 
exist f Here Professor Royce appears to me to make two serious 
mistakes. First, he argues that, as we are not concerned with 
an Unknowable, but with such a world as seems to be given in an 
unsatisfactory way in our sensations, with an experience, we may 
assume that it can only exist in a mind. Can there be an experi- 
ence except as it is experienced f If, then, there is a real world 
such as science testifies to, there is a mind in which it exists, i.e. 
God; or, if one so prefers to express it, it is a Divine Mind. 
Second, he tries to offer a proof that there is an external world. 

It will be observed that Professor Royce's first error is an old 
one. Nearly two hundred years ago Berkeley distinguished be- 
tween things as we perceive them — our fugitive perceptions of 
things — and things as continuously existing. As I have pointed 
out earlier, the distinction between the subjective order and the 
objective was not clear to him, and he conceived that nothing 
could exist save percepts. That things existed independently of 
his percepts, he could not but believe. Hence, he assumed a 
Divine Mind in which they could exist as percepts when he was 
not perceiving them. 

Berkeley was misled in part by the word " idea " ; Professor 
Royce is misled in part by the associations of the word " experi- 
ence." If we cannot know the external world except as it is our 
" experience," — our sensations, a content in our mind, — we can- 
not know the external world at all, and we cannot even speak 
with a meaning of "our sensations," as I have tried to show at 
length in Chapter XXIII. If, however, we decide to use the 
word " experience " in a broad sense, and as covering both the 
phenomena of the subjective order and the phenomena of the ob- 



590 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

jective order, we must remember that it applies both to what is 
mental and to what is not mental, but physical. What has really 
misled both Bishop Berkeley and Professor Royce is the fact that 
there is no phenomenon in the objective order which may not con- 
ceivably take its place in the subjective order. But we must not 
forget that, when it has its place in the subjective order, when it 
is regarded as sensation or as percept, it is no part of the external 
world. 

It is well for the reader to remember in this connection that 
minds do not directly perceive each other even in a fragmentary 
way. I may not directly perceive very much of the external 
world, but Professor Royce himself allows me glimpses of it. Of 
another mind, I have not even glimpses directly given in my 
experience — everything is matter of inference. If the external 
world of science really were a mind, an experience in the narrower 
sense, a consciousness, a direct sense-knowledge of it would be an 
absurdity. It is a stepping-stone to a knowledge of other minds, 
as we have seen in previous chapters, but a mind it is not, nor 
does its existence have to be proved as we must prove the exist- 
ence of every mind except our own. And this brings me to what 
I conceive to be Professor Royce's second error, — the attempt to 
prove the existence of the external world. 

Professor Royce himself points out that the phenomenal world 
to which science testifies is not an arbitrary world. It is linked 
to our actual experience. That the scientific accounts of this 
world are true, at least in a measure, we are said to verify in so 
far as we start from given experiences, frame hypotheses, predict 
other experiences, and fulfil these predictions. 

But what does this mean? It means that the experiences in 
question do belong to a certain order, the objective order, and can 
be proved to belong to this. They have their place in a system. 
Can we, however, be sure that the parts of the system not directly 
perceived exist? 

This question we ought not to attempt to answer without 
examining carefully what we can mean by the assertion that any- 
thing exists, really exists. I have tried to show earlier, in dis- 
cussing the nature of the external world, that when we speak of 
any physical thing as really existing, we mean no more than the 
assertion of its right to a place in the objective order. We do 
not mean that it is perceived — that is a very different thing ; it 



Of God 591 

may be perceived or it may not be perceived ; that has nothing" 
to do with its right to a place in the order of nature. We do 
not mean that it is any one's sensation ; what it must mean to be 
any one's sensation, I have explained at length. Thus, real exist- 
ence in the external world is guaranteed to any phenomenon 
only in one way — the phenomenon in question must belong to 
a certain order of phenomena which is contrasted with, and 
should never be confused with, another order of phenomena, the 
subjective. 

This is true of every single phenomenon which is referred to 
the external world. It is as true of our direct experiences as of 
those things arrived at by inference. This desk before me really 
exists. What can this mean? It means that certain phenomena 
are referred to the objective order. Abstract this reference and 
the words become quite meaningless. The real existence of this 
one experience is not a something independent of all other expe- 
riences. Men have often enough had what they supposed to be 
direct experiences of external things, and have by later experi- 
ences been compelled to relegate them to the realm of hallucination. 

Now the phenomena of the objective order are as immediately 
known as the phenomena of the subjective order. That is to say, 
we do not start with sensations and infer an external world. 
What is a sensation ? No answer can be given that does not 
recognize an external world and a mind contrasted with it. What 
€an one mean by the phrase " my fragmentary experiences " ? It 
is absolutely meaningless if we abstract from this same contrast. 
Can one say : Let us assume, for the moment, that nothing exists, 
save my fragmentary experiences ? The man who says this should 
make clear to himself what he understands by the word " exist," by 
the word " my," and by the word " experience. " When he has made 
this clear, he will realize that he is only making a feint of throw- 
ing away something. He is assuming his direct experiences^ his 
sensations^ to exist. How does he know these to be direct experi- 
ences, sensations? Only by reference to what he pretends to have 
thrown away. 

But shall we not admit that the external world, the objective 
order of phenomena, is known by us largely by means of symbols ? 
Of course. Let us, however, admit that the subjective order, our 
own mind, is known by us largely by means of symbols, as well. 
My " fragmentary experiences " of the world are not, as a whole, 



592 Other Minds , and the Realm of Minds 

present to me intuitively. The sensations which I have experi- 
enced during the past year, the past month, the past week, cannot 
possibly be represented by me in a single intuition. What is 
actually in the sense at this present moment is a very small part 
of ''my fragmentary experiences." Shall I assume that the rest 
have existed^ even if they do not now exist ? What is meant by 
this past and this present ? Is there a real time, and have these 
sensations really existed in real time ? The truth is that he who 
would withdraw himself from the system of things, in order to 
prove that there is a system of things, never really withdraws 
himself from that system for a moment. He only pretends to 
do so. 

It is, then, absurd to try to prove the existence of the external 
world. We know it as directly as we know our own minds. Do 
we know as much of it as we know of our own minds ? That is 
a different question. But it is well to remember that we cannot 
start an argument with "our experiences"; that our experiences 
are in large measure symbolically known by us ; and that the 
psychologist has laboriously to establish for us what our experi- 
ences are, much as the physicist establishes for us what exists 
in the external world. 

It appears to me that these distinctions have not been clearly 
grasped by Professor Royce. He asks : What is the proof of 
the reality of an absolute experience, i.e. of a real external 
world ? And he answers this question as follows : Let us sup- 
pose nothing exists save our finite experience. This then, is 
absolute truth, that there is nothing but this fragmentary expe- 
rience. But if it is truth, it must be true for somebody. It is 
not true for us, for we do not know whether the fact is as stated. 
It must be true for somebody. There is then an absolute expe- 
rience for whom it is true. 

This I must briefly criticise, in the light of what has been 
said above, as follows : (1) The reality of the phenomena, which 
Professor Royce does not include in our fragmentary expe- 
riences, but to which science testifies, does not have to be proved 
in any other way than by showing that they severally do have 
their place in the order recognized by science and by the plain man. 
Their place in that order is the only conceivable guarantee of 
tlieir reality. It is a mistake to suppose that we must first 
show that they belong to the order in question, and then go on to 



Of God ' 593 

prove that they are real. (2) It is not legitimate to begin an 
argument with the supposition that, beyond our finite experience, 
nothing exists. By " our finite experience " is presumably meant 
the fragmentary sensory experiences with which the argument 
has been concerned. Abstracted from the system of things, these 
experiences cannot be called fragmentary, cannot be recognized 
as sensory, and cannot be said to have real existence. (3) The 
statement that, if it be true that nothing exists save these frag- 
ments, it must be true to somebody, is an ingenious but very 
questionable adaptation of the Berkeleian error that there can be 
no existence save mental existence. 

The last turn in the argument is not, I think, convincing even 
to those who may be inclined to agree with Berkeley in thinking 
that nothing can exist save in a mind. We are to permit the 
solipsist 1 to guarantee himself society by reasoning thus : Either 
somebody exists besides myself or nobody exists besides myself. 
I shall assume that nobody exists besides myself. This then is 
true. But, if it is true, it must be true to somebody. It is 
not true to me, for I am ignorant touching this matter. Hence, 
somebody exists besides myself. 

What is the matter with this argument ? We can best answer 
this question when we have seen with some clearness what it 
means to say that this or that is true. 

Suppose I ask myself whether it is true that there are moun- 
tains on the other side of the moon. What can this mean. Pro- 
fessor Royce has pointed out with admirable clearness that the 
world of phenomena to which science testifies is not an arbitrary 
world. We cannot refer anything to it without good reason. 
What has a place in it must be related in certain ways to the 
"direct experiences" upon which he has dwelt. It is not always 
clear whether given phenomena stand in such relations to these 
direct experiences or whether they do not. Let us suppose that, 
in the present instance, the phenomena in question do stand in 
such a relation, I may then say : It is true that there are moun- 
tains on the other side of the moon. But it should be remarked 
that, when I say this, I do not say a whit more than when I say 
that there are mountains on the other side of the moon. The 

1 The man who starts out with direct "fragmentary experiences " must, of course, 
be a solipsist to begin with. Other minds are not included among his direct ex- 
periences. 

2q 



594 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

trutli is nothing superadded to the phenomena thus related to 
each other. The former expression is more emphatic than the 
latter, but it contains nothing more. 

It is, however, one thing to say : There are mountains on the 
other side of the moon : and it is quite another thing to say : I 
know that there are mountains on the other side of the moon. 
In the one case, certain phenomena are assigned a place in the 
objective order, and, in the other, we are concerned with a sub- 
jective order as well. In the latter instance an assertion is made, 
not only regarding the external world, but also regarding some 
one's knowledge of the external world. The distinction is one 
universally recognized, and it is important to realize all that it 
implies. The statement that it is true that there are mountains 
on the other side of the moon can only be confounded with the 
statement that some one knows it to be true that there are moun- 
tains on the other side of the moon by one who has never clearly 
grasped the distinction between the subjective order and the objec- 
tive, the mind and the world. He who says . It is true that there are 
mountains on the other side of the moon, says no more than that 
that there are mountains on the other side of the moon. But he 
who says, some one knows this fact to be true, does say more : 
he asserts the existence of certain mental phenomena not to be 
identified with anything in the objective order. 

Now let us suppose that it is not clear that the phenomena 
in question do stand in the required relation to our direct expe- 
riences. We may then say : It is uncertain whether there are 
mountains on the other side of the moon ; but of so much we are 
certain : it is true, either that there are mountains on the other 
side of the moon, or that there are not. Let us see what is implied 
in this statement. 

It is evident that the statement, if it is to be significant at all, 
implies a distinction between an order of things and our knowl- 
edge or ignorance of that order. It is not a statement regarding 
what is contained in that order. It is a recognition of the order 
and an affirmation of our ignorance regarding it. Is it a truth? 
Yes, it is a truth of a sort. Tliere was an eclipse of the moon 
last year : a certain phenomenon is referred to the order of real 
tilings. There was not an eclipse of the moon last year : the 
phenomenon in question is excluded from the said order. There 
•either was or was not an eclipse of the moon last year : has any 



Of God 595 

affirmation been made about the reality of an ecKpse ? No, but 
it has been asserted that there is ignorance of an eclipse. Is this 
ignorance real ? is it true that there is this ignorance ? Only if 
we admit that there is such a thing as truth or reality. To be 
true, to be real, the ignorance must have its place in a system of 
things ; and it must not be forgotten that, when we ask what sort 
of truth or reality we may attribute to the ignorance, we must 
find our answer in a reference to the sort of system to which the 
ignorance is supposed to belong. 

Now suppose I say : nothing exists save a, 5, and c. This 
means that a, 6, and c constitute an order of real things, and only 
a, J, and c are to be found in that order. It means no more to 
say : it is true that a, 5, and e constitute an order of things. 
The truth, the reality, is nothing apart from that order. 

Bearing all this in mind, let us come back to the solipsist. Let 
us suppose him to say : " Either nothing exists save my fragmen- 
tary experience, or something exists beyond my fragmentary 
experience." 

Let us remember that he is supposed to have absolutely noth- 
ing to start with save his "fragmentary experience." Out of this 
he must get all his notions of existence, possibility and impossibil- 
ity, reality, truth. If he gets these elsewhere, he does not start 
with his fragmentary experience. He only makes a feint of it. 

What can it mean to him to say what he has said ? He can 
only mean : I do not know whether I should put together in the 
one order a, 6, and <?, and rest with that ; or whether I may go 
on and add d. How shall he answer the query raised in this 
"should"? Evidently by an appeal to his fragmentary experi- 
ence. To what else should he turn ? There is for him no truth 
save that found in his fragmentary experience. 

Suppose him to continue as follows : " I shall assume that 
nothing exists save my fragmentary experience. This then is 
true. But it is not really true to me. Hence it must be true to 
some other mind, and some other mind must exist." The fallacy 
in this reasoning is evident. The statement : it is true that 
nothing exists save my fragmentary experience, differs from the 
statement : nothing exists save my fragmentary experience, only 
in being more emphatic. The argument starts, then, with the 
assumption, that it is true that nothing exists save my fragmen- 
tary experience. This is, be it remembered, an assumed truth — 



596 OtJter Mmds, and the Reahn of M'uids 

a something taken up for the sake of the argument. It is not 
shown from an examination of the fragmentary experience — the 
only data for proving anything — that this must be really true 
according to the standard of truth furnished by this fragmentary 
experience. It is, then, admittedly an assumed truth. But the 
solipsist argues: This truth is not really true for me (i.e. he 
remembers that it is assumed truth) ; but it is absolutely true 
(i.e. he forgets that it is an assumed truth) ; to be true, however, 
a truth must be true to somebody; therefore, it must be true 
{i.e. really true) to some one else. 

It is clear that, in this argument, the solipsist forgets that 
there are only two kinds of truths which he has a right to 
recognize at all. There are assumed truths, which are assumed 
by himself ; and there are real truths, which are real only in the 
sense that they can be justified by a reference to his fragments. 
If these fragments constitute a system, they can furnish a real 
truth — something may be true or real in the sense that it be- 
longs to the system. If, however, we assume these fragments 
to be so fragmentary that they can furnish no real truth, distinct 
from assumptions, our solipsist is left with no truth at all save 
assumed truth. Then he may not argue : This is not true for me., 
hut it is true. If it is not true for him, i.e. if it is not a truth 
discovered in the fragments which are his all, it is not a truth at 
all, in any sense that can mean anything to him. The fragments 
are his ; any real truth which they contain or may contain is or 
may be his ; the assumptions are his. Where in all this is there 
any truth which may be referred to any one else ? Even the 
Berkeleian, who holds that nothing can be true except as it is 
known to be true, may see that we have here no truth that need be 
referred to any mind save that of the possessor of the fragments. 

Why does an argument so defective succeed in puzzling us as 
this one has done ? It is because neither Professor Royce nor his 
reader really abstracts from what he is supposed to be abstracting 
from at the outset of the argument. There slips in at the very 
beginning the recognition of the system of things which is not 
supposed to make its appearance until the close of the argument. 
We involuntarily allow our solipsist, not merely a truth which may 
be abstracted from his fragments, but a truth independent of this. 
Thus, the system of things does not emerge from the supi)osed 
fragments as conclusion follows premises. 



. Of God 597 

It is not surprising that Professor Royce and his reader should 
fall into this confusion. As I have pointed out above, it is really 
not legitimate to begin with these supposed fragments. In call- 
ing them fragments we tacitly recognize a larger whole ; we say 
they exists and we do not mean to give the word a significance 
drawn wholly from the fragments themselves ; we speak of them 
as our experiences^ and the words are meaningless unless we recog- 
nize a system of things, with its distinction of subjective and 
objective. 

I have been betrayed into criticising Professor Royce's argu- 
ment at much greater length than I had intended. The purposes 
of this chapter might have been sufficiently served, had I con- 
tented myself with pointing out that the argument, whether good 
or bad, is, after all, only an argument to prove the existence of 
the external world recognized by science, and that it is only 
through a confusion that the external world can be identified 
with what men mean and have meant by God. 

But I have thought it right to do much more, and for the 
following reason : the original contributions which American 
scholars have so far made to philosophy have not, I think, been 
very striking ; in this argument Professor Royce offers us a bold, 
independent, and highly ingenious speculation ; he does not speak 
as the echo of a school, and, whether we approve the course of his 
argument or do not, we must admit that he has a right to an 
attentive hearing and to a frank and searching criticism. It is 
only in exercising the independence in speculation which he has 
exemplified, and in exercising an equal independence in criticising 
each other's efforts, that we can hope to do something more than 
paraphrase the words of those who have preceded us. 



CHAPTER XXXV 

OF GOD (Continued) 

Let us come back to the Argument from Design, the only one 
which, as I have said, has really been taken seriously by mankind. 
As it is commonly brought before us, it argues about as follows : ^ 

Things are constantly happening in the world about us ; these 
happenings must have their causes, and these causes, in turn, their 
causes ; no chain of causes, however, can be endless, but must end 
in a First Cause ; for, unless we assume a First Cause, we have 
really no cause at all, but only a series of effects or results, all of 
which are uncaused. 

Again : Causes must be proportioned to effects. We always 
assume a builder to explain the building of a house ; and if the 
plan of the house is particularly ingenious, we naturally infer that 
this is due to unusual ingenuity on the part of its author. To use 
a famous old illustration, no one, finding a watch in a desert place, 
would suppose that it had any other cause than the mind and 
hands of a watchmaker — the only thing we know capable of 
making a watch. If, now, we look at the world about us, do we 
not find on every side evidences of adaptation and apparent pur- 
pose ? Are not means fitted to ends through the whole domain 
of nature, and is not the whole domain of nature one, a unit, a 
single system ? If we go back to the cause of all this, must we 
not infer that there is but one First Cause, wise as well as power- 
ful, who is the author of this harmonious plan, and the source of 
all its workings ? And since the things we see indicate, not 
merely a plan, but a good plan, must we not infer that the Author 
of Nature is not merely a Mind, but a Good Mind — such a Being 
as we mean when we use the word " God " ? 

To this argument, as thus presented, there at once suggest 

1 Some of the following reflections I have presented before in a little work 
which has for years been out of print: "A Plain Argument for God;" Thil- 
adelphia, 1889. 

608 



Of God 599 

themselves certain objections. For one thing, it is by no means 
self-evident that the series of causes and effects may not be endless. 
There is no more sense in saying that, unless there be a first calise, 
there is no cause at all, and there is only a series of effects, than 
there is in saying that, unless there be some last effect, which does 
not in turn become a cause, there is no effect at all, and there is 
only a series of causes. A cause is a cause in relation to what fol- 
lows it, somewhat as a father is a father ; we do not have to inves- 
tigate its pedigree before we can affirm that it is a cause. This 
part of the argument looks like a premeditated attempt to get 
back just as far as one wishes to go, and to have an excuse for not 
going farther. 

Perhaps I should say : to get back as far as one does not wish 
to go ; for I am sure that those who use the argument have no 
desire to be carried back to the point to which it would logically 
carry them. Here we have a second objection to the argument, 
and a very grave one. The argument is deistic, not theistic, i.e. 
it gives one a God, not now revealed in the world, a present God, 
but a God whose only provable relation to the world is a thing of 
the past, and of a very remote past at that. 

Suppose some one to say : " The argument is excellent, I 
accept it. I believe that God created the world and set nature in 
motion, but I believe that there His contact with the world ceased. 
There is no evidence that He is now in any direct relation with 
me, or is in any sense present. His action belongs to the past, 
not to the present." How will the champion of this argument 
answer that ? May he try to answer it by pointing to evidences 
of God's wisdom or goodness as seen in the world to-day ? He 
will at once be told that, according to his own argument, to prove 
God the author of this goodness he must go back to a First Cause. 

It is worth while to examine a little more carefully this deistic 
notion that God was more directly revealed in some remote begin- 
ning of things than He is in the present. The distinction between 
a relatively direct and a relatively indirect revelation of mind is one 
with which we are familiar enough. We read an old letter, and 
we refer the mind which it reflects to the past ; we talk Avith a 
friend, and we do not refer to the past the ideas which seem to be 
revealed. The man who picks up the watch above referred to 
accounts for it by going back to certain bodily motions which have 
taken place at some time in the past, and these bodily motions he 



600 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

regards as revealing mind as directly as it is conceivable that 
another mind should be revealed. He does not, be it observed, 
ascend the chain of physical causes until that chain runs out 
altogether, and nothing more that is physical is forthcoming. He 
goes back a little way, and then turns aside to a something not 
physical, because he finds in the physical what he regards as a 
direct revelation of mind. 

Yet his argument for a Divine mind discovers no direct evi- 
dence for mind until it arrives at a last link in the physical chain 
— a link which, if the teacliings of science are to be accepted at 
all, we may assume to be much less clearly indicative of mind of 
any sort than what makes its appearance long after. It should be 
remembered that, in passing from this last link to God, he is tak- 
ing a step which is not analogous to that which is taken when one 
passes from watch to watchmaker ; he is taking a step which is 
analogous to that which is taken when one passes from the watch- 
maker's body to his mind. Is it clear that such a view of things is 
reasonable ? 

As the reader has observed, I have criticised the argument we 
are discussing without going much beyond the standpoint of the 
man who urges it. It is open to criticism even on this basis. 
But one may go farther and say, that the whole argument as 
above set forth moves in an atmosphere of what we may call 
" ready-made " conceptions — conceptions taken up and used with- 
out previous critical analysis. It will not be profitable to dwell 
upon it at greater length, and I shall leave it with the remark 
that it is not taken very seriously even by those who defend it, 
for it is a deistic argument, and I know of no deists alive at the 
present day. This seems to indicate rather clearly that its cham- 
pions rest their belief in God, which is a belief in a present God, 
not upon this argument in this form, but on something else. 

It should be remarked that the above criticisms are not 
directed against the contention that a Divine Mind is revealed in 
the world. They bear only upon the peculiar way in which that 
Mind is supposed to be related to the world. Hence, I must not 
be supposed to be objecting to the argument from design in gen- 
eral, but only to one of the forms in which it has found expression. 
Can it be expressed in a more reasonable form ? 

Let us remember that we are in search of a mind. IIow can 
a mind be revealed? What does it mean to say tliat a mind 



Of God 601 

exists ? These questions I have tried to answer in earlier chap- 
ters. We have seen that there is but one argument for minds, 
and that the existence of a mind means to us the same thing, 
whether we are concerned with minds of a higher or of a lower 
order. He who maintains, then, that the world as a whole reveals 
a Divine Mind, must, in the last analysis, maintain that there is 
some analogy between the world as a whole and a human body — 
he must attribute to the world something analogous to a soul. 

Can it be proved that there is revealed in the world such a 
Soul or Mind, a something distinct from the little minds that we 
refer to individual organisms ? The theistic zeal of Bishop Berke- 
ley found the evidence for God quite as indubitable and far more 
abundant than the evidence for the existence of men's minds. He 
writes : " A human spirit or person is not perceived by sense, as 
not being an idea ; when therefore we see the color, size, figure, 
and motions of a man, we perceive only certain sensations or ideas 
excited in our own minds ; and these being exhibited to our view 
in sundry distinct collections, serve to mark out unto us the exist- 
ence of finite and created spirits like ourselves. Hence it is 
plain we do not see a man — if by man is meant that which lives, 
moves, perceives, and thinks as we do — but only such a certain 
collection of ideas as directs us to think there is a distinct princi- 
ple of thought and motion, like to ourselves, accompanying and 
represented by it. And after the same manner we see God ; all 
the difference is that, whereas some one finite and narrow assem- 
blage of ideas denotes a particular human mind, whithersoever we 
direct our view, we do at all times and in all places perceive mani- 
fest tokens of the Divinity — everything we see, hear, feel, or any- 
wise perceive by sense, being a sign or effect of the power of God ; 
as is our perception of those very motions which are produced by 
men."i 

But it must be admitted that the inference that there is a God 
rests upon an analogy far more remote than that upon which we 
rest the inference that the minds of other men exist. It is perhaps 
conceivable that a man should maintain that there are no minds 
in existence save his own. Even those who have admitted that 
the assumption of the existence of other minds cannot be justified, 
have, however, unhesitatingly accepted the assumption. The 
analogy is too close, it is too little of a step from my mind to the 

1 "Principles," § 148. 



602 Othei^ Minds y and the Realm of Minds 

mind of my neighbor, to make solipsism practically possible. No 
one save the metaphysician ever thinks it necessary to examine 
critically the evidence that other men have minds, and to point 
out its peculiar nature. On the other hand, there are few who 
think it unnecessary to offer proofs of God's existence. The 
labor and thought which men have in the ages past devoted to 
the subject, and which they still devote to it, is sufficient evidence 
that they have not thought and do not think they are dealing 
with what is self-evident and requires no proof. 

And since the analogy in question is so remote a one, it need 
not surprise us to find even the man who is penetrated with the 
conviction that God exists, quite vi^illing to confess that he stands 
in the presence of unsolved mysteries when he raises certain 
natural questions regarding the manner of His existence. Is the 
Divine Mind related to finite minds just as they are related to 
each other ? This seems impossible, for, as Bishop Berkeley has 
recognized in the above-cited passage, the same phenomena which 
serve as a basis for an inference to finite minds seem also to 
serve as a basis for the inference to a Divine Mind. May we 
regard the Divine Mind as including finite minds — as partially, 
at least, made up of such ? We know of no such relation between 
minds as seems to be implied in this. When such questions as 
these present themselves to him, there seems nothing else for a 
man to do than to confess his ignorance. And those who have 
done some reading in the history of philosophy and of theology 
will recall to mind the many emphatic expressions of ignorance 
which have sprung to the lips of those who have pondered upon 
the Divine Nature in the centuries past. 

But if such are the limitations of human knowledge, is it 
possible to jprove that God exists ? To this, I think, we must 
answer that, if by the word " proof " is meant such definite evidence 
as must carry conviction to the heart of every fair-minded man 
before whom it is clearly placed, we cannot offer a proof of God's 
existence. 

This amounts to saying that such a proof does not, at present 
at least, fall within the sphere of science. But I hasten to add 
that this does not necessarily imply that the man who believes in 
God does so groundlessly. There are a vast number of beliefs the 
justice of which cannot be scientifically established, unless we 
give this term an excessively broad application ; and yet many of 



Of God 603 

these beliefs it is not reasonable to repudiate. The man who 
would cast out of his mind all beliefs for which he is not in a 
position to offer definite and detailed evidence should first reflect 
upon the extraordinary denudation of his mind which must result 
from such a procedure. We walk by faith much of the time, and 
sometimes we have no choice save to walk where the clear light 
of assured knowledge does not reach. 

I beg the reader to bear in mind what has been said in Chapters 
XXVII and XXVIII of our knowledge of other minds. It is a 
knowledge which we must all admit to be neither very exact 
nor very extensive. Some things we seem to know rather 
clearly, but our knowledge gradually fades out into such 
utter indefiniteness that, beyond a certain point, we are willing 
frankly to admit that we are in the region of mere conjecture. 
And we should not overlook the fact that we believe regarding 
other minds, and hold that we are justified in believing, many 
things that it is quite impossible to prove by the adduction of 
detailed evidence. From indescribable shadings of expression, 
from trifling hints and gestures, we come to a conviction about 
a man's character, and we are not in a position to say why we 
think of him as we do. We take refuge in certain rather vague 
phrases : " I feel that the man is insincere ; " " he makes upon me 
an unpleasant impression ; " " he inspires me with an instinctive 
confidence." The fact that our conviction cannot be justified in 
detail does not prove that it is without foundation. Convictions 
resting upon no better evidence have constantly turned out in the 
sequel to be well founded. 

All of which means that we may make inferences touching 
minds without being able as yet to bring such inferences under 
the head of truths scientifically proved. The inference to the 
existence of God appears to be of much the same nature. To 
many men — and not necessarily to the ignorant and the unreflec- 
tive — the conviction that a Divine Mind is revealed in the world 
seems an irresistible one. They may point out in a general way 
the sort of phenomena that influence them the most strongly to 
the adoption of such a belief. From the sketch of a Bridgewater 
Treatise developed by Socrates in his conversation with Aristode- 
mus the Little, as reported by Xenophon,^ to the most recent 
works on final causes and evidences of design, we have a long list 

1" Memorabilia," I, 4. 



604 Othe7' Minds, and the Eecdm of Minds 

of such attempts. Such works strengthen the convictions of some 
men, and some they leave unconvinced. It is scarcely too much 
to say that if his experience of the world and the facts of his own 
life do not at least incline a man to recognize the analogy upon 
which the inference of God's existence rests, it is not likely that 
he will be convinced by reading. 

With those who do admit the analogy, I am glad to enroll my- 
self. But I think it is important to recognize that the analogy is 
a remote one. One gains nothing by pretending to more informa- 
tion than one really has, or by confusing Faith with establislied 
knowledge. And if one bears in mind the nature of our evidence 
for God and the limitations of our knowledge of Him, one can 
read with new sympathy certain passages from the old theologians, 
which the modern man is apt to approach with something akin to 
irritation. 

For example, when Augustine tells us that we are to think of 
God as " good without quality, great without quantity, a creator 
though lacking nothing, controlling things but without spatial 
position, containing all things without being qualified or deter- 
mined, in no place and yet everywhere present in his totality, 
eternal without time, making things that are changeable without 
any change in himself, and passive in no respect " — v.dien Augus- 
tine tells us that we are thus to think of God, we may admit that 
his words, taken literally, are absurd, and yet may value tlie 
thought that underlies them. Their author is evidently strug- 
gling with the reflection that, if we think of God at all, we must 
think in terms which draw their significance from our own experi- 
ence, and that this carries wdth it a danger that we shall not make 
due allowance for the difference between the Divine Mind and 
the human. 

It should not be overlooked that it is possible so to emphasize 
this difference as to do away altogether with the ground for an 
inference to the existence of God. The effort to avoid anthropo- 
morphism — the attribution to God of a nature akin to that of 
man — has again and again resulted in making the word '* God " 
a meaningless symbol ; which is, properly speaking, no symbol 
at all. 

As the reader has seen, there is no argument for the existence 
of another mind that is not, in a sense, antliropomorphic. No 
mind is revealed to another mind directly ; it is inferred, not per- 



i 



Of God 605 

ceived. And I could make no inference at all, did I not perceive 
some analogy between the actions of my own body and those of 
other bodies. Where the analogy is close, I infer a mind closely 
similar to my own ; where it is perceived to be more remote, but 
still unmistakably an analogy, I infer a mind somewhat different. 
But the inference to a mind totally different from my own is an 
absurdity. There remains nothing on which to found an infer- 
ence, on the one hand, and, on the other, the mind inferred is 
denied every shred of meaning, Le. there is no possible reason 
for calling it a mind. 

There is, then, such a thing as a legitimate anthropomorphism 
in reasoning about other minds. There is evidently also an 
anthropomorphism that is illegitimate. The fables that attribute 
sound reflections and reasonable discourse to the brutes assume 
such for a purpose, and no one is deceived. But in countless 
instances we do deceive ourselves by attributing to creatures 
below man a degree of intelligence which we are not warranted 
in attributing to them. The remedy for such errors is to be 
found in a more careful examination of the evidence, not in a 
general denial of all ground for inference of any sort. Much the 
same thing may be said touching our conception of a Divine 
Mind. In a sense, every such conception must be anthropo- 
morphic, and the admission of this truth need startle no one who 
is not more or less of a slave to the associations which attach to 
words. 

With this I bring to an end what I have to say touching the 
nature of the evidence for a Divine Mind. He who finds such 
revealed in the world cannot regard the world as dead and mean- 
ingless, nor can he deplore the fact that the realm of minds has 
shrunk to insignificant proportions. To him it is no longer a 
fact. Everywhere he is in the presence of life ; of a Life in 
which, as he believes, he very literally lives and moves and has his 
being. And he may take much comfort in this thought, while 
frankly admitting that he knows little of this Life, and that his 
belief is a something that reaches beyond the present borders of 
science. 

There is one more topic upon which I should, perhaps, touch 
briefly before bringing this volume to a close, and that is the 
immortality of the soul. It is not the duty of the metaphysician 
to prove the immortality of the soul, just as it is not his duty to 



606 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

prove the existence of God or the existence of any particular 
man. But he can scarcely refuse to examine the conceptions of 
Avhich men make use when they argue on the subject, for such 
conceptions evidently call for metaphysical analysis, and there is 
danger in taking them up uncritically. 

The discriminating reader has, I hope, observed that the 
acceptance of the doctrine contained in the preceding chapters 
does not imply a rejection of the doctrine of immortality. It has 
been pointed out that we can best represent to ourselves the rela- 
tions of minds and bodies under the figure of parallelism. One 
who accepts this view of the relation may, it is true, feel impelled 
to infer that the dissolution of the body implies the disappear- 
ance of the mind, which has been referred to it, from the realm of 
existing things. But the inference is, I think, only justified in 
case one has no positive reason for believing that minds continue 
to exist. It has been frankly admitted that our knowledge of the 
relations of mental phenomena and physical phenomena is an 
extremely vague and indefinite knowledge. We may accept all 
that psychology and physiology have to tell us, and still confess 
that we are in complete ignorance of the immediate physical basis 
of any psychical fact. Neither of the world of matter nor of the 
world of mind have we such complete information that we are able 
to say with assurance that what appears to us as the destruction 
of the body is necessarily the destruction of the physical basis of 
the mind which has been revealed by it. 

Out of our ignorance upon such matters there have sprung up 
various speculations touching the existence of a " meta-organism," 
which may continue to exist, and which may still serve as the 
physical basis of mind. The parallelist has as much right as 
another to accept such speculations. If he be wise, he will bear 
in mind, however, that he is here guessing at possibilities, and not 
reasoning upon a basis of observed fact. These speculations can- 
not be regarded as falling under the head of science, and the man 
of science not already impelled to believe in immortality would 
probably in no instance consider them seriously. Still, we must, 
I think, admit that such considerations as have been adduced at 
least serve to indicate that the belief in the immortality of the 
soul is not necessarily excluded by our knowledge, such as it is, 
of the facts of the physical world and of the mental world. 

In discussing the immortality of the soul, it is well to under- 



Of God 607 

stand clearly what those words may legitimately mean. We 
recognize that minds exist during a longer or shorter term of 
years, and that, at the end of that time, the evidence for their 
existence disappears. The statement that they are immortal is 
tantamount to the statement that this disappearance of evidence 
is to be set down to our ignorance. Did we know more, we 
should still find evidence of their existence. 

This means that we are not to conceive of them as existing as 
disembodied spirits. What can we mean by the existence of a dis- 
embodied spirit ? We have seen that to affirm real existence of 
anything is to assign it a place in the system of things. We have 
also seen, in studying the difficulties into which the subjective 
idealist falls, that, if we repudiate the physical world, we are left 
without a system of things. A physical thing that exists nowhere 
and at no time does not exist. It is equally true that a mind that 
exists nowhere and at no time ^ does not exist. A disembodied 
spirit is such a mind. 

Again. Although we must believe that any mind which con- 
tinues to exist after the death of the body still holds a relation to 
the physical world at least analogous to that which it held before, 
we must not turn the mind into a physical thing, and establish 
the fact of its immortality by arguments which have a significance 
only when one is dealing with what is physical. For example, 
we must set aside all such arguments for immortality as that upon 
which Bishop Butler lays such emphasis in his famous "Analogy " 
— we must not argue from the unity of consciousness to the 
" indiscerptibility " of the soul. He who believes that his mind 
will survive the shock of dissolution because it is too small to 
split, materializes the mind and evidently misconceives the unity 
of consciousness. 

Still again. We must be on our guard against specious 
arguments drawn from a misconception of the nature of time — 
arguments which would demonstrate the immortality of the soul 
somewhat as the arguments criticised in the last chapter would 
demonstrate the existence of God. 

Thus, we may not argue that, since time is not something 
beyond the mind, but is in the mind, it is impossible that the mind 
should come to an end of existence in time. Such an argument 
palpably confuses subjective and objective, and ignores that real 

1 See Chapter XXIV. 



608 Other Minds, and the Realm of Minds 

system of things spread out in space and time, in which minds 
and bodies have their part. He who falls into such an error can 
make no distinction between what seems and what is ; he is 
robbed of his real world. 

Nor may we save ourselves the trouble of proving that the 
mind will continue to exist after death, by taking refuge in that 
logical monstrosity, a timeless eternity. He who wishes to per- 
suade us that there may be such a thing as a non-spatial ubiquity 
must convince us that the word " ubiquity " still means something, 
after all reference to space and to position in space has been 
abstracted from ; and he who attributes to the mind a timeless 
eternity should show clearly that the word " eternity " is not a mere 
sound when all reference to time has been stripped away. It 
should not be forgotten that a mind, whose mode of existence — 
may I use the expression ? — is timeless^ is a mind which never has 
existed, does not now exist, and never will exist. But I have criti- 
cised at length this curious conception of a timeless eternity in a 
special monograph,^ and I shall not dwell upon it here. It is 
sufficient to say that no account of it has yet been given which 
does not surreptitiously introduce the notion of time. 

If we refuse to follow such doubtful by-paths to a knowledge 
of the immortality of the mind, in what direction shall we look 
for a road that may lead us to our goal ? I know of but one. If 
the world impresses us as a world of purposes and ends, a world 
in which God is revealed, we may cherish the hope that in the 
Divine plan there is room for the fulfilment of the aspirations of 
man. It is scarcely necessary to say that, in cherishing this hope, 
we walk by Faith. 

1 On Spinozistic Immortality. Philadelphia, 1899. 



NOTE ON THE PHYSICAL WORLD-ORDER 



EDGAR A. SINGER, JR. 

It is a matter of common experience that we know something of 
the meaning of the term body and of the distribution of bodies in space 
and time before we are acquainted with those physical laws which, 
where they are known, enable us to describe bodies in new ways and to 
arrange them in that system which we call the physical world. 

The task of discovering these laws, of effecting these descriptions, of 
constructing this system, belongs to a group of sciences, which, though 
differing inter se, we are accustomed to include under the single name of 
physical science. I say we are accustomed to refer to a single physical 
science : I mean we constantly hear such questions as these : What is 
the physical basis of life ? How far are differences of civilization due 
to physical, how far to economic, etc., causes? These and similar ques- 
tions lead us to contrast a science of physical causes with such sciences 
as biology, psychology, and sociology. But just what sciences are 
included under the head of the physical, and on what ground they are 
included is by no means an easy matter to determine. Perhaps all 
would admit to this class the sciences of physics and chemistry ; some, 
with Helmholtz, would include geometry ; others, with the " mecha- 
nists," would include biology. But even if we confine ourselves to gen- 
eral physics and chemistry, there are still to be noted wide differences 
in method. Between mechanics, say, and chemistry, these differences 
are of sufficient importance to make the problem of finding a common 
nature in the two branches of science an extremely difficult one. 

Nevertheless, I think we can frame a definition which, if applied to 
the sciences actually known, would bring into one class those which are 
usually included under the head of physical science, and explain the 
uncertainty in which we remain concerning others. 

I venture to say, then, that a physical science is one which employs in 
its description of nature only such terms as can adequately be defined by the 
use of the measuring rod. 

What is here meant by the description of nature offered by a science 
will best be understood if we consider a typical scientific problem : 
2 R 609 



610 The External World 

Given a group of bodies, in which are to be found certain conditions, 
such as position, vohime, mass, temperature, etc., what changes of con- 
dition are these bodies going to undergo ? To answer this question we 
should have to be in possession of a law which connects these conditions 
with one another and with time. The description of nature offered by 
a science is nothing other than the law or series of laws which it has 
formulated. 

Now, our definition asserts that such a law is a physical law, if to 
understand its meaning and to verify its truth no knowledge is presup- 
posed other than such as is involved in the use of the measuring rod. 
In examining the application of this definition to known sciences, its 
import will be seen more clearly. 

The use of the measuring rod, i.e. the description of the procedure 
by which we may determine the ratio of two lengths, is established in 
certain of the axioms of geometry. All the axioms are not devoted to 
this description ; some explain the way in which, knowing how to de- 
termine the ratio of two lengths, we may determine the relative mag- 
nitudes of two angles. We may say, therefore, that all that portion of 
geometry which is not a definition of measurement, but which records 
the results of measurement, falls under our definition of a physical 
science. 

Next let us turn to the science of mechanics, and by way of fixing 
our thoughts we may consider a particular law of mechanics, say, the 
law of gravitation. This law is of such a nature that in order to apply 
it to a group of bodies we are obliged to know the mass of each body, 
its position, and the velocity with which it is moving. Applying the 
law, we can calculate the values which these conditions will assume at 
any moment. Now, of the terms used in this description, the positions 
of the bodies would evidently be determined by the use of the measur- 
ing rod in conformity with the principles of geometry ; but when we 
describe the motion of bodies we are obliged to introduce such terms as 
velocity and acceleration. These terms stand for quantities and are 
susceptible of measurement, but in determining their values it is not 
sufficient to measure space magnitudes ; we are obliged also to measure 
periods of time. It may not at once be apparent in what sense time 
can be determined by the use of the measuring rod, yet the physicist 
defines time as the hour-angle of a certain star, and this angle is, in the 
last resort, determined by measurements of length. Time, therefore, 
and consequently such ratios of space and time as velocity and accelera- 
tion, are determined by the use of the measuring rod. 

Finally, in our mechanical example we have had to make use of 
the term mass. This once more appears in our law as a quantity sus- 
ceptible of measurement; but in what sense can this measurement be 



The Physical World-Order 611 

effected by the use of the measuring rod ? The mass of a body is not 
determined by its geometrical form or by its volume, for two bodies of 
exactly the same form or of the same volume may have different masses 
ascribed to them ; and to suppose with Democritus that bodies are made 
up of atoms which themselves differ in mass only as they differ in vol- 
ume, would carry us beyond the limits of scientific experience. It is 
not necessary to introduce any venturesome hypothesis in order to under- 
stand in what sense the physicist's determination of the mass of a body 
depends solely upon measurements of length. Indeed, in the simplest 
instrument for determining mass, viz. the balance, it is at. once evident 
that no observations are made except observations of position. This, 
to be sure, is a determination of mass under particular conditions ; but 
it can easily be shown that the most general definition of mass which 
the physicist can frame is stated in terms of positions and motions 
involving only such quantities as can be determined by the use of the 
measuring rod.^ 

It is clear, then, that if the science of mechanics were nothing but 
an application of the law of gravitation, it would fall within the class 
of physical sciences as here defined. ]N"ow, although the science of 
mechanics may include other laws than that of gravitation, these other 
laws must yet resemble the law of gravitation in that the only terms 
which they employ are ultimately definable in terms of mass, lengthy 
and time. What has been said, therefore, of these terms as they occur 
in the law of gravitation, might be said of them with equal truth as 
they occur in any other law of mechanics. So that we may conclude 
that the science of mechanics employs in its description of nature only 
such terms as may be understood by the use of the measuring rod, and 
that consequently it falls within our definition of a physical science. 

The other sciences that are ordinarily recognized as physical build 
on the mechanical basis, i.e. the new terms which they introduce into 
their description of nature involve in their definition the three whose 
meaning has been fixed by mechanics. A complete description of these 
new terms would lie outside the plan of the present paper. We may, 
however, indicate the lines which such a discussion would follow, by 
considering the sense in which the units introduced into general physics 
are in the end determined by the use of the measuring rod. 

Thus, a unit quantity of heat is the quantity required, to raise a 
unit mass of water one degree centigrade. The term " mass " we have 
already considered: it need hardly be pointed out that the ordinary 
measure of temperature, — the expansion of mercury, — is a linear 
one, while a degree of absolute temperature is defined by Thompson 
in terms of mechanical work. Again, a unit quantity of electricity is 
1 Vide Mach, "Mechanics in its Development," ed. 2, p. 243. 



612 The External World 

the quantity which acts on a similar quantity with unit force at unit 
distance. Now a unit force is one which would impart to unit mass a 
unit acceleration. The measure is therefore based upon mechanics, and 
the instrument actually used in the measurement, say Coulomb's torsion 
balance, is read in degrees of arc. As a last example, a unit atomic 
mass, though difficult to define, involves no measurements save those 
which determine mass and volume. 

These units which enter into the different physical sciences reveal 
in a characteristic way the nature of the sciences. It is only when 
we are in possession of the fundamental laws of a science that we can 
define the meaniug of such units. This discussion of them will 
suggest the way in which a complete examination of the physical 
sciences with respect to their definition would have to be made. I 
shall take it to be sufficiently established for our purpose, that physical 
sciences describe nature in terms whose meaning depends wholly on the 
use of the measuring rod. So defined, we see that they would include 
the known sciences of mechanics, general physics, and chemistry; but 
what sciences, if any, would such a definition exclude ? 

Suppose one were asked : What is the future of republican institu- 
tions ? or, What is the cause of the decay of the drama ? Would a 
reasonable person be likely to arm himself with a foot-rule with which 
to discover the answers to these questions ? And yet such questions 
have a meaning. The demand of the one for prediction and of the 
other for explanation is a scientific demand, and a scientific effort can 
be made to meet it. Only it seems scarcely sensible to ask one to put 
these problems in such wise that a measuring rod would play any part 
in the solving of them. 

Take another question : AVhy did the picture of a summer day in 
another land come into my mind just now as I looked out upon a bleak 
landscape? I search among my ideas for links of association. The 
law of association with which I am for the moment satisfied can 
apparently not be expressed in terms reducible to space measurements. 
Even the observation of living organisms whose simpler forms behave 
in a way that we are more and more inclined to regard as determined 
by physical and chemical laws, gives rise to terms and laws that seem 
to have no reference to the foot-rule. Habit, inheritance, variation, 
natural selection, — these terms mean something; they describe con- 
ditions we can recognize ; the laws have a significance ; on the basis 
of given conditions they serve us in prediction and explanation. We 
are evidently dealing with a science, but with one which ai)pears to fall 
without our definition of a physical science. 

It would seem, then, that there might be sciences pursuing nu^thods 
other than physical, at least there is a reason for thinking so sufficient 



The Physical World-Order 613 

to have given rise to interesting problems concerning the possible limits 
of the physical image of nature, For example, the question has often 
arisen in the history of reflective thought : To what extent have we a 
right to expect that for every definable natural phenomenon a physical 
explanation may be found? We may illustrate the meaning of the 
question, as well as indicate its answer, by a particular example. 

"VVe said that physical science devotes itself to the study of objects 
in space and time, so far as their behavior is ultimately describable 
in terms of the measuring rod. Among the bodies whose behavior is 
thus describable are the bodies of our fellow-men, and our own. The 
body of my neighbor yonder would fall from a height to the earth 
with the same acceleration as would a stone. The physics and chemis- 
try of the processes of nutrition, secretion, etc., going on in his body 
are becoming better known. Even that portion of its activity which 
we are accustomed to regard as deliberate, and which sufficiently dis- 
tinguishes his body as animate and conscious, may still resemble the 
behavior of an inanimate machine in its obedience to such laws as that 
of the conservation of energy. Have we not, therefore, every reason 
to suppose that, with advancing science, that particular natural phe- 
nomenon, — the behavior of a given human being, — will receive a 
physical explanation ? 

No sooner, however, do we conceive a hope of receiving a physical 
answer to the kind of question respecting our neighbor's behavior that 
we have instanced, than it occurs to us that there are many questions 
respecting such behavior to which we would not expect a physical 
answer. The beautiful old illustration that Plato gives in the Phaedo 
will serve us here. Socrates, it will be remembered, was sitting in 
prison awaiting his execution. The painful interval remaining was to 
be whiled away in pleasant discourse with his disciples on the immor- 
tality of the soul. In the course of the discussion Socrates is led to 
consider in what different ways things may be explained. He recalls 
the enthusiasm with which he first learned that Anaxagoras, instead of 
resting satisfied with the old order of mechanical causes, had sought to 
show how ^' mind was the disposer and cause of all." But he was 
quickly undeceived: — 

" What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed ! 
As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or 
any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and 
water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who 
began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of 
Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my 
several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my 
body is made up of bones and muscles ; and the bones, as he would 



614 The External World 

say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles 
are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or 
environment of flesh and skin which contains them ; and as the bones 
are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, 
I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a 
curved posture ; that is what he would say, and he would have a similar 
explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, 
and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of 
the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the 
Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have 
thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sen- 
tence ; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine 
would have gone off to Megara or Bceotia, — by the dog of Egypt they 
would — if they had been guided only by their own idea of what was 
best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of 
playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which 
the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and 
conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and 
muscles, and the other parts of the body, I cannot execute my purposes* 
But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way 
in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very care- 
less and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish 
the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the 
dark, are always mistaking and misnaming." 

There is here a physical situation which Plato roughly outlines, 
but to have this situation pointed out to us in reply to our question, 
Why, Socrates, are you sitting here ? strikes us as droll. Besides the 
physical questions respecting Socrates' behavior and the physical 
answers which in the course of time we may hope these questions 
will receive, there would seem to be otlier questions which are not 
physical, and to which we can neither hope, desire, nor conceive a 
physical answer. 

To reconcile these two points of view an assumption has sometimes 
been made which will illustrate very well one sense in which physical 
science has been supposed to be of limited application to nature. The 
assumption is, — and we may suppose Descartes to make it, — that in 
spite of the fact that most of the behavior of a human body is capable 
of explanation in terms of physical science, yet not all of its behavior 
is so. Even if we were in j)ossession of the most complete physical 
knowledge, a part of that behavior would remain unpredictable on 
physical grounds. This part is not, perhaps, inexplicable, but if we 
try to explain it, it must be in terms which have no physical meaning, 
e.g. in terms of motives. In our example it was the suggestion of a 



I 



The Physical World- Order 615 

physical explanation for this part of Socrates' behavior which furnished 
the comic element in Plato's sketch. 

This way of looking at the matter would seem to be intelligible, at 
least. We find a ship propelled by a physically describable machine, 
but to explain its whole behavior we should have to take into account 
the helmsman, who is no part of that machine. The human body is 
analogous. It is a machine directed by a soul, which is no part of that 
machine. The part of this conception which demands our immediate 
attention is not the introduction of the soul, but the hypothesis of an 
incomplete physical machine. We are not concerned with the ade- 
quacy of the non-physical filling, but with the assumption of the physi- 
cal gap. The assumption is, that part of the behavior of an object in 
space and time cannot be explained in physical terms. 

With regard to this hypothesis I need not ask. Is it true? but 
rather, Is it intelligible ? does it really mean anything ? In the first 
place, it will be noted that the hypothesis in question is not an attempt 
to point out our actual inability to give a physical explanation of a cer- 
tain phenomenon. This inability every one would admit. The point 
of the whole hypothesis is that the phenomenon is assumed to be essen- 
tially inexplicable in physical terms. What, we ask, does essentially 
inexplicable mean in this connection ? 

By way of leading up to this special question let us ask a more gen- 
eral one : When is any phenomenon shown to be inexplicable in terms 
of any given law? That we do constantly assume phenomena to be 
inexplicable in terms of a given law, hardly needs illustration, but to 
give one, — the turning of a galvanometer needle under the influence 
of a current is said to be inexplicable in terms of the law of gravita- 
tion. But why ? 

Here we must go step by step, and let us begin with a very simple 
case. If I dip the end of a capillary tube into a tank of water, the 
water will rise in the tube and remain stationary at a certain distance 
above the level of the water in the tank. This phenomenon is described 
as a case of capillary attraction, and it was once supposed that capil- 
lary attraction might be explained in terms of the law of gravitation. 
It is now generally admitted that no such explanation is possible. In 
what does the proof of this impossibility consist? To say that the 
rise of water in the capillary tube cannot be the result of gravitation 
would at first suggest nothing more than the perfectly evident reflec- 
tion that the mass represented by the little column in the tube cannot 
be repelled from the centre of the earth in conformity with a law which 
provides for the attraction of masses. 

But with this obvious conclusion might come a new suggestion : if 
we consider the walls of glass and the column of water to be made up 



616 The External World 

of molecules of glass and water respectively, could we not make such 
hypotheses respecting the masses and the interstitial distances of these 
molecules as would reveal the rise of a mass against gravity to be really 
a case of the same law of gravitation ? The question is meaningful, 
and if we are at liberty to distribute the masses and the distances with- 
out further restriction than that the sum of the molecular masses should 
equal the gross mass, the spatial arrangement of the molecules conform 
with the gross dimensions of the bodies, we should, no doubt, be able 
to explain the phenomenon of capillarity on a gravitational basis. But 
the question at once arises, Are we free to distribute masses and assume 
distances without other restrictions than those mentioned? Such might 
be the case if the phenomenon of capillarity were the only one which 
led us to assume a molecular structure of bodies. As it is, however, 
the size of molecules and their distances have been fixed by observations 
quite independent of the phenomenon of capillary attraction, and they 
have been fixed in such a way that without revolutionizing the rest of 
molecular physics, those particular phenomena cannot be explained in 
terms of the law of gravitation. 

This, then, is the sense in which, in the actual pursuit of science, 
we say that a given fact cannot be explained by a given law. But it 
will be remarked that this demonstration is of a somewhat hesitating 
kind. So much depends upon our definition of the phenomenon we are 
called upon to explain. Define it in one way, it is inexplicable ; define 
it in another way, it is explicable. These two or more ways of defin- 
ing a phenomenon are necessarily consistent but they are sufficiently 
different to make it possible to return the answer yes and no to the 
same question. How can we ever be sure that we have obtained a final 
no to the question. Can such and such a phenomenon be so and so 
explained ? The most that we can say is this : the given phenomenon 
cannot be explained by the given law, unless we describe the phenome- 
non in a way which would only be permissible in case we made changes 
of such and such magnitude in our accepted scientific conceptions. 
Nevertheless, let us take this demonstration of the inexplicability of 
a given phenomenon by a given law as the nearest approach we can 
make to absolute demonstration: let us admit that it offers all that 
can be demanded of such a demonstration. The question arises. Under 
what conditions has it a meaning to ask for such a demonstration of 
inexplicability ? 

If I mix a kilogram of water at 50° C. with a kilogram of water 
at 100° C. without allowing any heat to escape, the resulting mixture 
will have a temperature of 75° C. Can this phenomenon be explained 
by the law of gravitation ? It seems absurd to ask such a question. 
We no longer seek to demonstrate the impossibility of the explauation 



I 



The Physical World-Order 617 

demanded : we are satisfied with an immediate insight into the meaning- 
lessness of the proposition. Evidently, we say, it is impossible that a 
phenomenon for whose description we require the term " temperature " 
should be susceptible of explanation by a law in which the term 
"temperature" does not even occur. Capillary phenomena may not be 
explicable by the law of gravitation, but they are at least describable 
in the dimensions of that law, to wit, the dimensions of mass, length, 
and time. It is therefore meaningful to ask whether such phenomena 
be explicable in terms of this law, and we require a demonstration of 
the law's failure to explain before we answer in the negative. But the 
suggestion that a phenomenon describable in one set of dimensions 
should be explicable by a law applying to another set of dimensions, is 
one that it would occur to no one seriously to offer. 

If it be meaningless to ask for a mechanical explanation of the phe- 
nomena of heat, so long as these phenomena are described in terms of 
temperature, there is, nevertheless, a way in which we may redescribe 
the phenomena of heat without making use of this non-mechanical 
term, and when we have so redescribed the phenomena the search for a 
mechanical explanation of them no longer presents an absurdity. Sup- 
pose in our example we were to describe the water of higher tempera- 
ture as a body whose molecules were vibrating with a certain average 
velocity, and the water of lower temperature as one whose molecules 
were vibrating with another and lower average velocity. Now let us 
picture to ourselves that in the mixing of these two masses of water 
the redistribution of velocities takes place according to the known laws 
of impact of elastic bodies, giving a mean average velocity for the mix- 
ture. We should then have given a mechanical explanation of the 
phenomenon of mixture, having first, however, given it a mechanical 
description. 

The moment it becomes meaningful to ask whether a phenomenon 
be explicable in terms of a given law, at that moment it becomes neces- 
sary to demonstrate the impossibility of such an explanation before 
accepting a negative answer to the question. The search for the 
mechanical explanation of physical phenomena is one of the signifi- 
cant movements of physical science, and we observe the conditions to 
the success of this search. They are, first, the restatement of the 
problem in mechanical terms ; and second, the finding of a law in 
which these terms may be connected. We have seen (in the example 
of the phenomenon of capillary attraction and the law of gravitation) 
the sense in which a phenomenon describable in mechanical terms may 
be demonstrated to be inexplicable by a given law connecting such 
terms. We now ask whether any such demonstration could be given 
of the impossibility of the more general task of explaining a given 



618 The External World 

mechanical phenomeuon in terms of any mechanical law. In the first 
case the demonstration was one only when we placed upon ourselves 
certain restrictions as to the nature of the assumptions that could be 
made. In the present case, too, demonstration would evidently be 
possible only in case we were able to find similar (though perhaps 
much broader) restrictions. If, for example, we were to understand by 
a mechanical explanation not merely one that was conceived in terms 
of mass, length, and time, but further one that was required to conform 
to particular axioms (the axioms, say, of Newton's mechanics) it is 
conceivable, — yes, it has even been suggested, — that certain physical 
phenomena could receive no mechanical explanation. But if we free 
ourselves from all restrictions, it follows from what has gone before 
that no such demonstration would be possible. It would therefore be 
meaningless to make the hypothesis that a mechanical phenomenon 
was inexplicable in mechanical terms. It would evidently be equally 
meaningless to make the no more restricted hypothesis that a given 
physical phenomenon, i.e. a phenomenon capable of physical descrip- 
tion, was inexplicable in physical terms. 

We have now seen in what cases it is meaningful and in what cases 
it is meaningless to make the hypothesis that a given phenomenon is 
inexplicable in terms of a given law : — 

(1) If inexplicable is to mean anything more than unexplained, we 
must intend the inadequacy of the type of explanation sought to be 
demonstrable. 

(2) We see that such a demonstration could have a meaning, 
although a relative one, in case we were required to explain a 
phenomenon describable in certain terms by means of a special law 
connecting these terms (e.g. to explain capillarity by the law of 
gravitation). 

(3) Under this head would fall also the case in which we were 
required to explain a phenomenon describable in one set of terms by 
a special law connecting another set of terms, provided we were first 
able to redescribe the phenomenon in the terms of the law {e.g. the 
case in which we were asked to explain the phenomenon of the heat 
of mixtures in terms of the law of impact of elastic bodies). 

(4) It is meaningless to seek for a demonstration of the inexpli- 
cability by a given law of a phenomenon described in another set of 
terms without first redescribing the phenomenon in the terms of the 
law {e.g. to seek a mechanical explanation of the phenomenon of 
the heat of mixtures, described in terms of temperature). 

(5) And finally it is meaningless to ask for a demonstration of the 
inexplicability of a given phenomenon in terms of a law upon which 
no restriction is laid {e.g. the inexplicability of mechanical phenomena 



I 



I 



The Physical World- Order 619 

in terms of mechanical law, of physical phenomena in terms of physical 
law). 

We may now apply these results to the problem of human con- 
duct as exemplifying a phenomenon the possibility of whose physical 
explanation has been doubted. We asked in what sense it had a 
meaning to make the hypothesis that such a phenomenon was incapa- 
ble of physical explanation. We have now seen that it can only have 
a meaning to make such an hypothesis in case it has a meaning to ask 
for a demonstration of the impossibility that is asserted. Now it is a 
matter of common experience that the conduct of a human being may 
be described and explained by means of certain laws, — laws, for exam- 
ple, in which the terms " motive '' and " character " occur, — long before 
it is possible to give any physical explanation of that conduct. Has it 
any meaning to suggest that the conduct thus described and explained 
in terms of motive and character may eternally lack a physical explana- 
tion ? Evidently the case is analogous to that in which we ask for a 
mechanical explanation of heat without first interpreting the phenomena 
involved in mechanical terms. The inexplicability is indeed eternal in 
about the same sense that the problem of finding the number of square 
inches in a cubic foot is eternally insoluble. But it need scarcely 
be said that to admit this inexplicability is not to assert that we 
have found a physical phenomenon which must eternally lack a physi- 
cal explanation. We have found no gap in the order of the physical 
world. 

The problem is, however, an entirely different one if we state it in 
the Cartesian way. For Descartes, the phenomenon to which a physi- 
cal explanation was denied was already described in physical terms, 
say in terms of a slight displacement of the pineal gland. The 
hypothesis that such a physically described event should be eternally 
lacking a physical explanation is, as we have seen, meaningless, for 
the reason that it can have no meaning to ask for a demonstration 
of the inexplicability asserted. We may conclude, therefore, that this 
interesting phenomenon of human conduct offers us no illustration of 
a possible inadequacy of a physical explanation. It has only been 
supposed to do so either (1) because it was described in terms that 
were themselves not physical, — in which case physical explanation is 
neither possible nor is it lacking, — or (2) because, although described 
in physical terms, certain tacit restrictions are placed upon the nature 
of the physical laws which we contemplate ; as when in our example of 
the boat we tacitly restrict the meaning of physical law in such wise as 
to include the mechanism of propulsion but to exclude the activity of 
the helmsman from its possible scope. 

This somewhat lengthy analysis of a concrete example will enable 



620 The External World 

us to answer the question that suggested it, to wit : What would a non- 
physical science mean ? There seem to be sciences that formulate laws 
in terms that cannot be defined by the use of the measuring rod. Is 
then the ability to explain and to predict in physical terms an essentially 
limited one ? Or may the non-physical sciences coexist with the physi- 
cal without limiting them ? 

In the light of our previous study I think we can see in what sense 
the latter may be the case. It might perfectly well be that every phe- 
nomenon that was capable of a physical description (e.g. the motion of 
every particle of matter in the universe) was also susceptible of a physi- 
cal explanation, and yet that such phenomena might be so grouped in 
new classes as also to be subject to non-physical description and explana- 
tion. For example, any clock or watch is a simple mechanism, every 
detail of whose behavior is susceptible of a physical description and 
explanation. Yet there is no common physical description, i.e. no 
physical definition of a "time-keeper," including such heterogeneous 
mechanisms as a spring-watch, a pendulum clock, a water-clock, an 
hour glass, a sun-dial. These are grouped together, not because of 
their resemblant mechanisms, but because of their common function. 
Only from this point of view can we speak of a " good " or " bad " 
time-keeper. ^N'ow to ask "Why are dollar watches bad time- 
keepers ? " is a question to which the answer, " because of their cheap 
construction," would be satisfactory. The general rule " cheap watches 
are poor time-keepers " is a true law, but neither " time-keeper," " poor," 
nor " cheap " are terms of a physical nature. Yet in a watch that keeps 
"poor time" there is some physical condition, explicable by physical 
laws, which is not to be found in another resembling watch that keeps 
" good time." 

Just so, to pass from our homel}' example to the general case, 
whole sciences may be constructed whose objects of study have no 
common physical nature, hence no common physical definition, and 
which formulate laws governing the (non-physical) behavior of those 
objects in non-physical terms. It would be none the less true that 
each body was composed of particles of matter, and that each particle 
was subject to physical law. For example, it is readily imaginable that 
all attempts to find a physico-chemical definition of living organisms 
should fail. Is there any more reason that they should succeed than 
that all clocks should be susceptible of subsumption under a single 
mechanical definition? A living organism may be so called because 
of a peculiar function it fulfils, in spite of the complete heterogeneity 
of the physical means which are employed in the fulfilling. Should we 
expect, then, a science, whose object of study is the living organism, 
to formulate laws in physical terms ? On the contrary, we should 



The Physical World-Order 621 

expect to find just such terms as " habit," " variation from type," " selec- 
tion," " struggle," appearing in accepted explanations. But that is no 
reason whatever for doubting that every bit of matter that enters into 
a living being behaves in a way that is explicable, as it is describable, 
in physical terms. 

To conclude then this sketch of the physical world-order and its 
relation to the whole of natural phenomena : The definition of physical 
science here offered makes it the science of space detail. The hypothe- 
sis that every phenomenon describable in physical terms is incapable 
of explanation in such terms is a meaningless hypothesis ; but we need 
not conclude from this that the physical is the only science. The physi- 
cal details of nature may perfectly well be grouped in classes that are 
incapable of physical definition ; for objects thus described non-physi- 
cal laws may be developed. The same object, therefore, may be capa- 
ble of a double description. Any given human body, e.g.^ is made up 
of particles whose only description is physical. As so described its 
behavior as a whole is the resultant of the behavior of its parts, and is 
susceptible of physical explanation. This same human body is capable 
of classification with other human bodies, animal bodies, organisms, etc., 
whose common element is not physical. As so grouped its behavior is 
not physically described, and so cannot be physically explained. Yet 
this fact represents nothing indeterminate in the physical world-order. 



INDEX 



Activity: distinguished from causality, 
232-235; activity and teleology, 544- 
546. 

Analysis : reflective, 37 ff. 

Anaxagoras : on knowledge of reality, 133. 

Anselm: ontological argument, 574 ; real- 
ism, 577. 

Appearance : contrasted with reality, 
132 ff. ; Locke on the distinction, 138- 
144 ; the significance of the distinction, 
148-154; appearance and reality and 
the Unknowable, 415 ff. 

Argument from Design: see God. 

Aristotle : on reason and lower functions, 
78 ; conception of Divine Mind, 79 ; on 
seat of sensations, 235 ; on final cause, 
532. 

Atoms: modern doctrine, 142-145 ; ancient 
doctrine, 245-24(5. 

Augustine : on the soul, 80; on time, 194- 
197, 204-207; on predestination, 551- 
552; realistic argument for God, 576- 
577 ; how we are to think of God, 604. 

Automaton Theory : foundations laid by 
Descartes, 285-289 ; Spinoza's view, 289- 
293; Huxley on, 294-297; see Paral- 
lelism. 

Bain, A. : on mind and body, 317-318. 

Barker, G. F. : definition of energy, 141. 

Berkeley : on the nature of the self, 82 ; 
subjectivism criticised, 124-128 ; on the 
real and the apparent, 148 ff . ; on space, 
see Space ; on time, see Time ; on the 
mind and its ideas, 279 ; arguments for 
God, 573, 601. 

Bradley : on the Absolute, 578-584. 

Cassiodorus : on the soul, 80. 

Cattell : on the perception of small differ- 
ences, 46. 

Causality : meaning of cause and effect, 
232-233; causality and activity, 233- 
235; the subjective and the order of 
causes, 254-261; parallelism and cau- 
sality, 318 ff. ; mental phenomena and 
the causal nexus, 508 ff. ; final cause, 
see End. 



Clifford, W. K. : on space and the infinite, 
172 ff . ; on automatism and parallelism, 
298 ff. ; on identity of mind and brain, 
307-312, 325 ff . ; on the nature of things- 
in-themselves, 332 ff. ; on the subjective 
and the objective order, 382-383; ob- 
jects and ejects, 438-440; argument for 
mind-stuff, 514-517. 

Common Thought: mind and world in, 
1 ff . ; vagueness of, 3-4 ; contrasted 
with science, 4 ff . 

Consciousness: much of its content dim 
and vague, 34-36 ; how its elements are 
discovered by reflective analysis, 37- 
49; intuitive and symbolic, 49-55; how 
things are given in, 33 ff . ; ultimate ele- 
ments in, 67-70; broader and narrower 
sense of, 95-96 ; multiplex consciousness, 
461-466, 475-477 ; the unity of, 473 ff . ; 
subconscious mind, see Subconscious. 

Conservation of Energy : see Energy. 

Democritus : on knowledge of reality, 133 ; 
on existence of no-thing, 217 ; his atom- 
ism, 245-246, 554-555. 

Descartes : nature of the soul, 81 ; its ubiq- 
uity in the body, 97; on reality, 118; 
mind and body, 268-269, 285-289; on 
substance, 273, 321-322; at times a 
natural realist, 411-412; ontological 
argument, 574-575. 

Despine : on hypnotic phenomena, 501. 

Determinism : the only doctrine that guar- 
antees freedom, 567; account of the 
doctrine, 567-569. 

Disk : illustration of revolving, 177 ff . 

Eject: see Clifford; can eject become 
object ? 466-472. 

Elements: ultimate elements in conscious- 
ness, 67-70. 

End: and purpose, 527 ff.; is the end a 
cause at all? 529; Spinoza on, 530; 
Janet on final cause, 532-539; the doc- 
trine of ends, 538-549 ; parallelism and 
• teleology, 542; no end without con- 
sciousness, purpose in nature, 547- 
549. 



623 



624 



Index 



Energy : defined, 141 ; Ostwald's coneep- 
tiou, 518-51i); conservation of energy 
and mental phenomena, 520-526. 

Epicurus: the father of the "free-will- 
ist," 555. 

Epi-phenomenon : the term unfortunate, 
542, 547. 

Eternity : not timeless, 608. 

Evolution of Mind : 508 ff,, 526. 

Existence : double sense of the word, 119- 
131; existence of the world when un- 
perceived, 415 ff. ; existence of other 
minds, 433 ff. 

Explanation : meaning and limits of, 237- 
238 ; explanation of connection between 
mind and body, 307-312, 321-331, 395- 
398; limits of physical explanation, 
613 ff. 

External World : in common thought, 2-3 ; 
in science, 4 ff. ; psychologists' position, 
11 ; representative perception criticised, 
17 ff. ; illustration of the prisoner, 18- 
20; the doctrine that we perceive per- 
cepts and things side by side, 30-32; 
analysis of a concrete instance, 99 ff. ; 
world composed of sensational elements, 
115-118; what is meant by real things, 
118-120; danger in phrase " sensational 
elements," 120-123; distinction between 
appearance and reality, see Appear- 
ance; consists of matter and energy, 
141 ff . ; tactual things the real, 148-154 ; 
objection to reality of molecules and 
atoms answered, 154-161; world in 
space and time, 210 ff. ; world as mech- 
anism, 226 ff. ; the objective order in 
experience, 372 ff . ; external world not 
the Unknowable, 415 ff . ; in what sense 
we perceive the same world, 455-457; 
the causal nexus and mental phenom- 
ena, 508 ff. 

Fate: story of Oi^dipus, 550; fate in the 
Greek literature, 550-551 ; conception 
not irreligious, 551 ; Augustine's fatal- 
ism, 551 ; what is fatalism ? 552 ; causes 
of, 553-554; doctrine not scientific, 
554; resembles "free-will" doctrine, 
567. 

Fechner : on consciousness in plants, 460 ; 
on negative sensations, 50^^505. 

Fbial Cause: see End. 

Form and Matter : the distinction between, 
57 ff. ; form sometimes treated fantas- 
tically, 60-1)3; sometimes confounded 
with material element, 63-67. 

Foster, Sir M. : on mind and body, 257. 

'^Free-will" : Lucretius on, 5.')5-558; the 
doctrine not a religious one, 557 ; " free- 
will " and parallelism, 555)-5(>0; what is 
"free-will"? 560-561; consequences of 



the doctrine, 561-563 ; just a little " free- 
will," 564 ; significance for morals, 565 ; 
freedom and "free-will," 566; fatalism 
and " free-will," 567. 

Gerson: comment on ontological argu- 
ment, 575. 

God: purpose in Nature, 547-549; argu- 
ments for God, 572 ff. ; Berkeley's 
argument, 573; Anselm's ontological 
argument, 574 ; Descartes' version, 574- 
575 ; Gerson's comment, 575 ; Augustine's 
realism, 576-577; Anselm, Bruno, and 
Spinoza, 577-578; Spencer's quasi-the- 
ism, 578; Bradley's Absolute, 578-584; 
Scotus Erigena and the Absolute, 584; 
Royce's argument, 585-597; argument 
from design , 598 ff . ; God and immor- 
tality, (505-608. 

Green, T. H. : on things and relations, 63- 
70 ; on the self or knower, 86-88 ; the 
timeless knower a useless assumption, 
207-209, 478-485 ; consciousness as 
agent, 331. 

Hamilton, Sir W. : on space, 166 ; on time, 
198; on consciousness, 331; on relativ- 
ity, 378 ; on natural realism, 411 ; on un- 
conscious mental modifications, 490-503. 

Holding : inner identity of mind and mat- 
*ter, 325-326. 

Hume: his nominalism, 44 ff.; on the self 
or mind, 83; subjectivism criticised, 
129-130. 

Huxley: on natural necessity, 236; on 
animal automatism, 294-297; on proof 
of other minds, 441. 

Idealism : subjective, an impossible doc- 
trine, 363, 364-366; Berkeley's confu- 
sion of the two orders of experience, 
412-413. 

Ideas: in common thought, 3-4; in psy- 
chology, see Psychology, and Psycho- 
logical Standpoint ; time and place of, 
385 ff . ; see Mind. 

Immortality : arguments for, 605-608. 

Impressions and Ideas: the distinction. 
56. 

Infinity : of space and time, 216-224. 

Interaction : see Mind. 

Intuitions: not necessarily trustworthy, 
97-98; intuition of space in the Kan- 
tian doctrine, 165-168 ; the world in in- 
tuition and in conception, 210 ff. 

James, W. : on form and matter, 164 ; on 
the doctrine of interaction, 282; on 
parallelism, 317 ff. ; on mental phe- 
nomena and evolution, 523. 

Janet, Paul: on final cause, 532-539. 



Index 



625 



Janet, Pierre: on the unity of the ego, 
465, 473 fp. ; on multiplex personality, 
¥iQ-An ; the synthetizing activity, 478- 
479; other minds, 482. 

Jevons : on causality, 258. 

Kant: on the empirical and the rational 
self, 84; on space, see Space; on time, 
see Time ; on intuition and conception, 
210 ff. ; on empty space, 221. 

Knower : see Self. 

Knowledge : knowledge what and knowl- 
edge that, 63-70. 

Localization: of mental function, 313- 
314; time and place of sensations and 
ideas, 385 ff. 

Locke : nature of the soul, 82; on appear- 
ance and reality, 138-144; on secondary 
qualities of bodies, 253; on substance, 
273-274, 326-327 ; slips into natural real- 
ism, 412. 

Lodge, Sir O. J. : on mind and brain, 315- 
316. 

Lucretius: on "free-will," 555-558. 

Mach : on causality, 235. 

Mass : its measurement, 611. 

Materialism : its insufficiency, 245 ff. ; 
mind as a secretion, 249-251; mind as 
a function of brain, 251-253; science 
and the subjective, 253 ff. ; compared 
with idealism, 414. 

Mathematics: nature of mathematical 
knowledge, 7-9 ; infinite divisibility of 
spaces and times and the mathematics, 
184 ft. ; mathematical relations and 
existence, 222; geometry how far a 
physical science, 610. 

Matter: as treated by science, 141 ff. ; de- 
fined, 226. 

McCosh: on mind and body, 270; intui- 
tion, 331. 

Mechanism: the world as mechanism, 
226 ff.; attitude of science, 226-228; 
objections of Dr. Ward, 228 ff . ; mechan- 
ism and causality, 232-235 ; mechanism 
and necessity, 235-237; mechanical ex- 
planation, 237-238; are human beings 
mechanisms ? 238 ff. ; mechanism of the 
world, and mental phenomena, 508 ff. ; 
mechanics and space measurement, 
610-611. 

Melissus : on infinity of Being, 216. 

Mercier : on mind and body, 523. 

Mill, J. S. : confuses perceptions and 
things, 131 ; on substance and qualities, 
274; confuses the subjective and the 
objective orders, 380-381 ; argument for 
other minds, 434-437. 
2s 



Mind: see Self, and Consciousness; dis- 
putes as to ultimate nature of, 230-231 ; 
doctrine of the atomists, 246; miscon- 
ceived by the materialist, 247 ff. ; rela- 
tion to the order of causes, 254 ff . ; 
doctrine of the interactionist, 265 ff. ; 
interactionism materialism in disguise, 
265-272; mind as substance, 272-280; 
ideas interacting with matter, 280-283 ; 
automaton theory of, 284 ff . ; parallel- 
ism, see Parallelism; mind and brain 
identical, 307-312, 321-331; distinction 
between mind and world, 364 ff. ; sub- 
jective and objective orders in experi- 
ence, 372 ff . ; nature of connection 
between mind and body, 395-398; ex- 
istence of other minds, 433 ff. ; can 
existence of other minds be proven? 
448-453 ; our knowledge of the contents 
of other minds, 453-455 ; can two men 
perceive the same world? 455-457; 
limits of evidence for other minds, 
458 ff.; mind-stuff theory, 335, 461; 
more than one mind in one organism, 
461-466; can eject become object? 466- 
472 ; the unity of consciousness, 473 ff. ; 
unity of consciousness and the Neo- 
Kantian activity, 478-485 ; subconscious 
mind, see Subconscious; mental phe- 
nomena and the causal nexus, 508 ff. ; 
Spinoza and the world of mind, 509- 
510 ; Spencer on origin of mind, 513-514 ; 
mind-stuff and evolution, 514-517; 
Ostwald on mind and matter, 518-520 ; 
mental phenomena and the conserva- 
tion of energy, 520-526; mental evolu- 
tion, 526; Divine Mind, see God; 
immortality of the mind, 605-608. 

Mind-stuf: Clifford's doctrine of, 335, 
461, 514-516. 

Minimum sensibile : 169-171. 

Minimum visibile : 491 ff. 

Natural Realism: doctrine of Reid criti- 
cised, 400-411. 
Necessity : double sense of word, 235-237. 
Nominalism : see Realism. 

Objective Order: see Subjective Order. 

Occasionalism : the doctrine, 289. 

CEdipus : story illustrative of fatalism, 
550. 

Ontological Argument : see God. 

Ostwald : on mental phenomena and physi- 
cal, 518-519. 

Other Minds : see Mind. 

Parallelism : see also Automatism; Clif- 
ford's account of, 298 ff. ; explanation 
of parallelism, 307-312; what parallel- 
ism means, 315 ; what it does not mean, 



626 



Index 



315 ff . ; Lodge, Clifford, James, Bain, 
quoted, 315-321 ; again, explanation of 
parallelism, 321-331 ; i)arallelism taken 
literally self-destructive, 332 ff. ; how 
justitied, 371 ff. 

Pearaou, K. : on cause and explanation, 
237; on the "Telephone Exchange," 
242 ff. ; on the possibility of directly 
knowing other minds, 4(3(>-407. 

P/iysical Science : definition of, 609; which 
are the physical sciences, 612; other 
sciences, 012 ff. 

Place : of sensations and ideas, 385 ff. 

Plato : on higher and lower soul, 78 ; tri- 
partite soul, 285. 

Plotinus : on the soul, 80. 

Pollock, Sir F. : on Clifford's doctrine, 307. 

Predestination : 551-552. 

Predetermined Harmony: the doctrine, 
289. 

Primary Qualities : Locke on, 139-140, 
14(i-147. 

Prisoner in the Cell : illustration of, 18-20. 

Protagoras : his scepticism, 133-134. 

Psychological Standpoint : self-contradic- 
tory, 17 ff. ; illustration of the prisoner 
in the cell, 18-20 ; doctrine of represen- 
tative perception criticised, 20-26; ob- 
jection to psychological standpoint 
answered, 30-32; the standpoint modi- 
fied, 371 ff. 

Psychology : psychology as natural sci- 
ence, 9-16; psychology and meta- 
physics, 16. 

Pyrrho : his scepticism, 133-134. 

Realism and Nominalism : 37-55 ; realism 
of Augustine, Anselm, Bruno, and Spi- 
noza, 576-578. 

Reality : what is meant by the word, 118- 
120; contrasted with appearance, 132 
ff . ; reality of the world of atoms and 
molecules, 154-161 ; the real world in 
space and time, 210 ff . ; reality as thing- 
in-itself, 334 ff. ; reality not the Un- 
knowable, 415 ff. 

Real Things : analysis of a concrete in- 
stance, 100 ff. ; see Reality. 

Reflective Thought : 37-43. 

Reid : see Natural Realism. 

Representative Perception : doctrine criti- 
cised, 20-26. 

Richter, Jean Paul: on solipsism, 440- 
441. 

Royce, J. : argument for God, 585-597. 

Scientific Thought : contrasted with com- 
mon thought, 4 ff. ; nature of, illus- 
trated by botany, zocilogj', physiology, 
5 ; by chemistry, physics, mathematics, 
G-10; by psychology, 9-16. 



Scotus Erigena : on the Absolute, 584. 

Self : to the child, 1 ; to the plain man, 3^ ; 
to the psychologist, 14; doctrine of the 
self or knower, 71-93; historical sketch, 
78-88 ; doctrine of the atomic self, 262 ff. ; 
the Neo-Kantian activity and the unity 
of consciousness,478 ; see Consciousness, 
and Mind. 

Sensation: contrasted with idea, 56, 106; 
sensations and things, 99 ff. ; criterion of 
sensation, 103-106; distinction between 
sensations and things, 106-114; sensa- 
tional elements and the external world, 
115-123, 369 ff. 

Similarity : nature of, 46-49. 

Socrates: on explanation by reference to 
causes, 613-614. 

Solipsism : the doctrine criticised, 440-441. 

Space : the plain man's notion of, 162-163 ; 
Kantian doctrine contrasted with Ber- 
keleian, 163; exposition and criticism of 
Kantian doctrine, 163 ff. ; intuition of 
space, 165-168; Hamilton and Spencer 
quoted, 166; Zeno on, 172; Clifford on 
infinite divisibility of, 172 ff. ; the 
moving point and the revolving disk, 
177 ff.; infinitely divisible and infinitely 
divided, 183; space and the mathe- 
matics, 184 ff. ; Kant and real space, 
184-188; the Berkeleian doctrine, 188- 
193; space as intuition and as concep- 
tion, 210 ff. ; knowledge of space not 
independent of knowledge of the world, 
216 ff. ; infinity of space, 216-224 ; empty 
space, 224-225. 

Spencer, H. : on space, 166 ; the Unknow- 
able, 422-428 ; on the gulf between the 
mental and the physical, 512-513; on 
the origin of consciousness, 513-514 ; on 
the primitive nervous shock, 516-517; 
his quasi-theism, 578. 

Spinoza : nature of the mind, 81-82; paral- 
lelism, 289-293 ; influenced Clifford, ;}07 ; 
mind and body the same thing, 322-323; 
on a case of loss of memory, 4()6 ; on the 
self-sufficiency of the world of ideas, 
50<)-510; on final causes, 530. 

Stoics : on fate, 551. 

Subcojiscious Mind : three senses of the 
word subconscious, 488-489; Hamilton's 
argument for unconscious mental modi- 
fications, 490-503; Fechner on negative 
sensations, 503-505 ; the significance of 
the subconscious, 505-507. 

Subjective Order: contrasted with the 
objective, 372 ff. 

Symbol: the nature of, 49-55; ideas as 
symbols of external world, 112-114, 
2i:i-214. 

Teleology : 527 ff. ; see also End. 



Index 



627 



Thing-in-itself : Clifford's argument for, 
334 ff. 

Time: Augustine on nature of, 19Jr-197; 
Kantian doctrine criticised, 198-201; 
the Berkeleian doctrine, 201-202 ; crude 
time and real time, 202-204 ; tlie Augus- 
tinian problem solved, 204-207; the 
timeless knower explains nothing, 207- 
209; Augustine on time before the 
creation, 216; time as intuition and as 
conception, 210 ff. ; knowledge of time 
not independent of knowledge of the 
world, 216 ff . ; infinity of time, 216-224 ; 
time of sensations and ideas, 385 ff. ; 



time and arguments for immortality^ 

607-608. 

Units : physical, 611-612. 

Unknowable : distinction between appear- 
ance and reality and the, 147 ; criticism 
of Spencer's doctrine, 422-428. 

Ward, J. : on the concepts of mechanics^ 

228 ff. 
World : the world as unperceived, 415 ff . ; 

see External World. 

Zeno : on infinite divisibility of space, 172. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 

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A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 

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